It’s the first full day of Comic Con and I’m already exhausted.
The picture above is my point of view from the podium of the crowd – standing room only! – that came to the Masters of the Web panel this morning. It was 10AM on Thursday, the first panel set of the Con, and we filled the room. It was pretty cool, but as always too short. The panel was hosted by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the directors of Crank and Crank 2, as well as the upcoming The Game, of which panel attendees got a chance to see some cool clips. Clips filled with naked girls. Neveldine and Taylor are pretty cool.
While this was going on, tragedy struck in Hall H, the biggest room at the center, where the studios do their presentations. Steve Weintraub from Collider was struck by a falling pipe and rushed to the hospital. As of right now the word is that he’s doing okay, but some other people got hit as well.
This year’s Con is insane. I came here yesterday on a private train car rented by Fox Walden for City of Ember – we got to ride down with director Gil Kenan and the screenwriter and producer of the film. I visited the amazing set of the movie last year and Gil showed some footage – including stuff he was shooting on the day I was there – and the film looks pretty impressive. It’s almost like an action adventure art movie for kids.
When I got to San Diego I expected to breeze through press registration – instead I found the convention center to be swamped. After I finally got my badge I hit the floor for just a minute – I wanted to see the Owlship from Watchmen, which is at the Warner Bros booth – and found it to be completely packed. This was preview night and it was as full as some Fridays at previous years. I think that Comic Con is going to start expanding out to other nights; look for Tuesday to become the new preview night while Wednesday becomes a day of actual programming.
After getting some dinner and drinks, I went to see Tropic Thunder, which had a special (hilarious) Comic Con intro from Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. The movie is hilarious, and Undeclared fans will be happy to hear that Jay Baruchel is sort of the hero of the whole movie. Stop watching trailers and commercials for it now, though – many of the very good bits are spoiled in the clips. But even so, the movie is still great, and Tom Cruise steals the whole show.
Russ is right now sitting down in a panel for Twilight, the movie most anticipated by our 12 year old female readership, and I’m waiting to get into some Fox stuff and possibly snag a one on one with the hilarious Clark Duke. There’s a ton of shit going on today, and I don’t know how much I’ll get to update throughout the day, but I’ll be doing my best.
By the way, something weird happened with Twitter last night – I’ve lost everyone I’m following and most of my followers disappeared. The same thing happened with Russ. If you were following us to get up to the second Con updates, you may have to re-add us – devincf and russ_fischer.