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FEATURE
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Attendees with a four-day badge
that included Preview Night got an
early look inside the Exhibit Hall
on Wednesday, July 21, and the
opportunity to have first dibs on
the coveted exclusive merchandise.
Given the excitement and anticipation
surrounding the event, you would
expect a rush of Boxing Day sale
proportions when the doors opened
for the first time, but the crowds were well
behaved and nobody was trampled.
Preview Night was particularly special this
year, complemented by the world premiere of
Star Trek Beyond
, which was beamed onto
an outdoor IMAX screen by the bay with full
accompaniment by the San Diego Symphony
Orchestra, and a fan red carpet for Trekkers
to show off their uniforms and alien forehead
ridges.
Like a slow burn comic book epic, Comic-
Con builds gradually, with attendance
peaking on the Friday and Saturday, which
is also when the mega panels and studio
presentations are held in the legendary Hall H.
The Exhibit Hall was still easily accessible
on Thursday, and the cosplayers were
beginning to arrive in force, despite the
rising temperature that threatened to turn
stormtrooper armour into an oven.
Key panels included DreamWorks,
presenting footage from its upcoming
animated feature
Trolls
, with voice-
cast members Justin Timberlake and
Anna Kendrick in attendance. And Alec
Baldwin made a surprise appearance –
and his Comic-Con debut – to promote
the studio’s other major animated
offering,
Boss Baby
, in which the actor
voices the brash infant of the title.
Trolls
will be in cinemas December, with
Boss
Baby
to follow in 2017.
Oliver Stone was another unfamiliar face
at Comic-Con, premiering a new trailer
for his biopic
Snowden
, in which Joseph
Gordon-Levitt plays the eponymous NSA
whistleblower who found himself in more
trouble than Julian Assange. True to form,
Stone launched a scathing attack on modern
surveillance techniques, even going as far as
to describe
Pokémon Go
as “a new level of
invasion.”
Luc Besson’s
Valerian and the City of a
Thousand Planets
looks set to be the sci-fi
movie event of 2017, with the director back
in
Fifth Element
mode and big on production
design for this tale of a time-travelling agent
(Dane DeHann) charged with protecting the
universe from a rogue planet.
Friday brought the first
of the big Hall H panels,
with fans sleeping out to
be the first in line for the
Walking Dead
panel
Comic-Con fact...
The first sold out SDCC was
in 2008