Dungeons & Dragons and Superman: why Comic-Con is still the place to be

The days when San Diego’s Comic-Con was the only place to go if you wanted to predict your geek viewing future are long gone. Disney has its own D23 and Star Wars Celebration conventions, while there are myriad other industry events such as Las Vegas’s CinemaCon. And yet the original Comic-Con, which returns this weekend after a Covid-enforced absence, remains the ultimate fandom boiler room, a place where audiences and the objects of their rapt attention seem to be on a level playing field for at least one weekend.

If fans aren’t dressing up as giant Yodas, or trying to get out of the way of Lou Ferrigno as he rushes furiously from one signing session to the next, or remarking on how much weight Kevin Smith has lost and wishing him all the best, they are invited to pose their own questions for the stars in the infamous 6,000-capacity Hall H. It might be an illusion, but for a few days it feels like Hollywood and those who pay their hard-earned cash to grease its lucrative wheels are really one giant, glowing ball of joyous mutual affection. The fans love the stars and the stars love the fans – what’s not to like here?

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At the same time there’s always the suspicion that you can “win” Comic-Con without actually having made anything that approaches a decent movie. The new Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is expected to wow Hall H later today (it may even have taken place by the time you read this) with cast members such as Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith and Hugh Grant. A sneak preview (consisting of the cast ... hmm ... in their costumes) has indeed already been released by studios Entertainment One and Sweetpea Entertainment. Apart than that, we know very little about it, other than that it’s likely to take a pretty light-hearted approach to the material if the comedy backgrounds of directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley are anything to go by.

Pine (who will play a bard) might bound on to the stage, decapitate a passing orc and extinguish several mindflayers, all to the raucous joy of the watching audience. But this one could still end up being a bloodless stinker to compare with the awful Jeremy Irons-led version of D&D from 2000, or a horrible postmodern attempt at doing 80s fantasy nostalgia with an ugly and cheap last-minute lurch towards Stranger Things territory. On the other hand, it could be great – we just don’t know (and probably won’t until the movie itself arrives).

The same applies to Warner Bros’s showcase, which will take place on Saturday in Hall H and is expected to focus on the DC entries Black Adam and Shazam! Stars Dwayne Johnson and Zachary Levi are almost guaranteed to appear, and there are rumours that Henry Cavill might well turn up to drop a hint about his return to the role of Superman.

I for one want to see this, and if Cavill arrives on stage and promises to battle Johnson’s Black Adam in a future DC episode you know that the entire place is going to be popping like somebody just blasted the entire auditorium with gaseous MDMA. The problem is that Cavill and Johnson could go at each other to the death, right there in front of everyone, creating the most awesome Comic-Con moment of all time, and we still wouldn’t know if the movie is likely to be any good. In this particular instance, given there were quite a lot of people who went to see Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice on the basis that seeing the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight go at it heavy would be, y’know, pretty cool, all bets are most definitely off.

Later on Saturday, Marvel will take over Hall H, and here we would usually be guaranteed to get our first glimpse of movies that might actually be worth watching. Fantastic Four, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Secret Invasion, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and even Guardians of the Galaxy 3 could all get sneak peaks. Might we even get news (finally) of Deadpool’s R-rated debut in the MCU? What about X-Men, and in particular the casting of Wolverine? If Taron Egerton (who wants to play the adamantine-clawed antihero so badly he has clearly decided to keep talking to journalists about it until it happens) turns up in Hall H, we’ll know something big (OK tiny and ferocious) is in the works.

But Marvel has been going through a funny time lately, so there’s still no absolute certainty that getting loads of cheers at Comic-Con will mean the studio is getting back on track. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. After all, Kevin Smith is turning up even later in the evening to talk about Clerks III, and with all due respect to his film-making credentials, the man is really on everyone’s must-see list for his anecdotes. His next 10 movies could be total crap and the queues would still be snaking round the block.

The true test of Comic-Con would be if all 6,000 attendees of each panel were given free tickets to file back into the auditorium at a later date having actually seen the movie being hyped to the sky and back. The stars of said turkeys would also be contracted to return, and fans would be given actual rotten tomatoes to throw at them if they hadn’t enjoyed the final result.

Of course, this will never happen. That’s the thing about Comic-Con, it’s all about the joy of the moment, the uncritical, rabid anticipation of movies that right now nobody has any reason to expect will be anything less than utterly amazing, even if we know deep down that at least 75% of them will in reality turn out to be deeply average. Hey, at least you got to hear Smith’s one about the time he hung out with Prince. Maybe they should make that into a movie.