Skip to content

Ben Barnes

COMIC-CON SKED: Legendary Pictures Preview of GODZILLA & SEVENTH SON

Two weeks from today, Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures preview their upcoming blockbuster films at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, July 20th. Godzilla is the one that intrigues me most, having just wrapped three months of filming in Vancouver. As expected, the new Godzilla is a re-imagining of Toho’s iconic Godzilla, but this time it’s “humanity’s scientific arrogance” which creates the radioactive monster and these ones cross the Pacific Ocean to terrorize San Francisco not Tokyo. It’s not clear which cast will be on the panel  — Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, David Strathairn or Bryan Cranston — but director Gareth Edwards is expected to screen footage from Vancouver. Whatever is shown, I can’t wait to see it online. The 3D Godzilla reboot is scheduled for release on May 16th next year.

What’s behind the radioactive containment doors? Copyright Legendary Pictures

Read More »COMIC-CON SKED: Legendary Pictures Preview of GODZILLA & SEVENTH SON

BIG READ – Working the Comic Con Craziness in 2011 – Updated

Published July 21, 2011 on Vancouver is Awesome

How’s this for Comic-Con craziness? Twihards starting lining up outside the San Diego Convention Center three days early (on Monday) to be among the six thousand lucky enough to get into The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 1 panel in Hall H, which took place just before lunchtime today. Breaking Dawn 1 was the first panel in Hall H so that Twihards couldn’t ruin Comic-Con like they usually do. What’s even more crazy? That the vampires and werewolves of the mainly Vancouver-shot Breaking Dawn 1 aren’t the most popular panel of the hundreds at Comic-Con 2011. Not even close. That honour belongs to the zombies of AMC TV series The Walking Dead.

Breaking Dawn 1 isn’t even among the most popular of Vancouver-filmed movies and TV series at Comic-Con, which has become less about big movies and more about cult television series in recent years. Locally-shot TV series Pscyh cracked the Top 25 most popular panels and Fringe, Eureka, Supernatural and Alcatraz are all in the Top 50. Breaking Dawn 1 and Underworld Awakening (the fourth in the movie franchise but only the third to star Kate Beckinsale and her vampire cat suit) barely made the Top 50 cut.

Psych presented today to standing-room-only, people-turned-away capacity, with Psych-os either dressed as pineapples or carrying them. Apparently series star James Roday (seen above directing a vampire-themed episode) improvised with a pineapple in the show’s premiere and there’s been one hidden in every episode since. Nominally a detective series, Psych knows how to play to a Comic-Con crowd, with several episodes in its sixth season (now filming in Vancouver) crossing over into genre stuff like vampires, super heroes and Star Trek. In a real casting coup, the original Captain Kirk — William Shatner — plays the father of one of the main cast in an episode filmed Read More »BIG READ – Working the Comic Con Craziness in 2011 – Updated