His wife Maggie Gyllenhaal dated Batman (and Two-Face!) in The Dark Knight, and Peter Sarsgaard follows her lead into superhero movie waters, playing the villain Hector Hammond in Green Lantern. “Now I guess its my turn, although I didn’t do much kissing,” Sarsgaard quips. He’s a biologist and a university professor, Sarsgaard says, “but in his private time he’s quite interested in extremophiles. Extreme violence on earth is the way to understand creatures that live on another planet. There’s a fine line there between science and wishful thinking.” And after he comes in contact with a meteor, he gains powers and a really huge brain. Check out a clip below of Sarsgaard explaining some of the inspiration behind his portrayal of Hammond.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
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We’ve talked with Mark Strong about his role as Sinestro in Green Lantern before, but now at least we know a little bit about what he’s going to look like: pink skin, yellow eyes and a thin David Niven mustache, just like in the comics. Strong revealed last week at Comic-Con that he and Ryan Reynolds are currently training for a fight between Sinestro and Reynolds’ Hal Jordan — Hal is brought to Oa, the planetary home of the Green Lantern Corps, and Sinestro tests his worth. “He believes he knows best,” Strong says of his character. “He becomes mentor to the newly minted human Green Lantern, and basically guides him through his first steps. I don’t think of him as a villain or in a bad sense. He’s just an incredibly powerful presence who knows what he believes and he wants to be right.” Check out a short clip below where Strong talks about another sequence in the film featuring some well-known Lanterns (at least to comics fans).
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
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Lately, Blake Lively is finding herself a long way from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, her usual stomping grounds on the CW hit Gossip Girl. In the superhero flick Green Lantern, Lively plays Carol Ferris, a businesswoman in the aircraft industy and on-again, off-again love interest of Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), the man who will become Green Lantern. In the comics, Ferris turns into Star Sapphire, a supervillain that finds her way back to the side of good every so often, but it’s not yet known how much we’ll see of that transformation in the film. But Lively is revealing that her stunt work has involved an aerial rig created for The Matrix. “I think it goes about 20 feet high, but I like to say 50, so please spread that rumor because it makes me feel cooler,” she says, laughing. Check out a short clip below of Lively explaining some of what goes into her action scenes.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
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When Ryan Reynolds took the stage for Green Lantern at Comic-Con last week, he seemed a comfortable sort in front of 6,500 fans. However, now that he’s back in New Orleans filming next summer’s big comic book movie, he’s also back in a motion-capture suit that is not overly fun to be running around in or to be wearing while getting thrown into harnesses for on-screen flight sequences. “Really, if I were wearing anything, it’s going to be pretty uncomfortable doing an action movie at his time of the year in the Deep South. I can’t be too hard on the suit,” Reynolds says. He’s already been dinged up a smidge, but that’s to be expected. “You want to be able to stay out of the hospital for as long as you possibly can during the shoot,” he quips. “But it is a Martin Campbell movie, so you’re bound to be there once or twice. Martin once described it as a knife fight in a phone booth, and that’s a really apt description: It’s rough, it’s dirty, it’s fast and you’re got to be ready for it.” Check out a clip below of him describing his “Cinderella element” having to do with his Green Lantern facial accessory, and click here for his description of his character, pilot-turned-superhero Hal Jordan.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
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Alternate worlds are going to be an even larger aspect of the Fox sci-fi series Fringe when the show returns for a third season on Sept. 23. That means playing a totally different character for most of the cast, including Jasika Nicole. She worried in the beginning about how long her role, a junior federal agent named Astrid Farnsworth, would hang around. “I still take the PDF file and I search for Astrid and I make sure she doesn’t die. You never know!” she says. But her patience has paid off over that slow build, getting to play both Astrid in our world and the very cold and enigmatic Astrid of the alternate universe. She talked at Comic-Con last week about the differences between those characters and what family member she looked to for inspiration for alterna-Astrid, so read below for her thoughts.
Photos courtesy of Fox
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Remember the old TRON figures back in the early 1980s? For as high-end as the movie was in the Reagan era, they did leave a lot to be desired. It turns out, though, they’ve gotten better over the years, as has the 3D technology and other stuff that’s making the new sequel TRON: Legacy possible. Disney is releasing a whole slew of toys this fall to coincide with the Dec. 17 release of the film — you know kids are going to want to a Light Cycle under the tree this Christmas — and they had some neat stuff on hand at Comic-Con to showcase. New TRON: Legacy star Garrett Hedlund had his first look at his oversized Sam Flynn figure at the event while visiting the huge Disney booth on the San Diego Convention Center floor, and we caught up with him to talk about seeing himself as a toy for the first time — set to the soundtrack of a bunch of screaming female fans. (And check him, and all those wonderful things that will be turned into toys, in action in this new TRON: Legacy trailer.)
Photo courtesy of Disney
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The upcoming TRON: Legacy was one of the big hits of Comic-Con last week, and Disney had many aspects of the film for fans to consume, from footage to toys to the very cool Flynn’s Arcade, a fully functioning arcade with 1980s games that debuted last year as a viral-marketing tool in San Diego and returned this year for the big pop-culture event. For fans of the 1982 original TRON, though, the main attraction was star Jeff Bridges, who was very much an integral figure at this year’s Comic-Con. The recent Oscar winner (pictured with fellow TRON star Bruce Boxleitner) reprises his role in TRON: Legacy as Kevin Flynn, the hacker who gets transported to a digital computer world (his son, played by Garrett Hedlund, searches for him when he goes missing) as well as plays a younger version of himself that is a new incarnation of Flynn’s original computer program named Clu. Check out a video below from the TRON: Legacy press conference where Bridges explains what led to him signing up for a TRON sequel.
Photo courtesy of Disney
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Say what you will about its lack of “geek cred,” Glee has an overabundance of Gleek cred, filling the impressive Ballroom 20 on the last day of Comic-Con yesterday. Last year, the event was the start of an impressive viewer campaign by creator Ryan Murphy and the cast, and executive producer Brad Falchuck made sure to remember that during this year’s panel. “We create this show in a large dark room and we have no interaction with you. We owe all the success of the show to you people here,” he says. After devoting nearly 30 minutes of their allotted hour panel to clips from last season, the Glee crew took questions from the audience and revealed some key bits of the coming season, so read below for more.
Photo courtesy of Fox
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With all the superheroes that created buzz yesterday, many fans didn’t forget their favorite small-screen one. They started lining up late last night to get into this morning’s Comic-Con panel for Smallville, and it was bittersweet for many since this is the CW show’s 10th and final season. Fortunately, series star Tom Welling was in attendance and was the star for the thousands who can’t wait to see Welling put on his Superman suit finally on the long-running show. He hadn’t seen the suit yet until a montage piece revealing some exclusive footage showed a clip of the red and blue get-up in a box — which was actually the same one used in the movie Superman Returns. Even sans superhero costume, Welling received much of the queries during the fan Q&A session, including one asking if Clark Kent was ever going to finish college. “Hopefully on the Internet he’ll get his Bachelor’s,” Welling quips. Read below for more news coming out of the Smallville panel.
Photo courtesy of The CW
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One of the coolest things about Comic-Con is the very early screenings of movies that studios trot out to garner buzz and get mouths talking at the event. In recent years, Tropic Thunder, Inglorious Basterds and District 9, among others, have all been Comic-Con fodder, as Scott Pilgrim vs. The World has been this time around. The horror movie The Last Exorcism (in theaters Aug. 27) screened tonight for folks, and it’s a rather impressive recent film in the genre. Told in faux documentary style, the story follows Louisiana holy man Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), the youngest in a long line of exorcists. But unlike his predecessors, he doesn’t believe in demons and thinks “exorcising” them from people is a load of hooey. Cotton decides to take a camera crew along to film how much hooey it exactly is when a teenage girl named Nell (Ashley Bell) is thought to be possessed, and the preacher doesn’t quite know what to believe anymore when he finds something seemingly otherworldly: Is a supernatural force afoot, or is it just this girl’s insanity talking? It’s creepy (much more than that last “buzzworthy” horror film, Paranormal Activity), really well made and as funny as a movie can get about exorcising demons. And in a time when most movie special effects are all done on computer, only one digital effect exists in The Last Exorcism, which was revealed during a Q&A session with the filmmakers, including director Daniel Stamm and producer (and horror nut) Eli Roth. Roth shared a story that as a kid he always thought he was going to be possessed by the devil, “until my mother told me Jews didn’t believe in the devil,” and he was asked by one person if he was concerned about the movie being compared to the 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby. “Better that than Repossessed,” Roth reasons. “We hope it’s a Rosemary’s Baby for a new generation.” Read below for more highlights from yesterday’s Comic-Con schedule.
Photos courtesy of Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures/Marvel
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It’s not shocking to see Nathan Fillion, the Castle star who’s an object of affection for geek girls everywhere, clad in a Green Lantern shirt. At Comic-Con, he is among his people, Fillion says. And those are the same people who campaigned to have Fillion star in the new Green Lantern movie, a role that went to his co-star from the late-1990s sitcom Two Guys and a Girl, Ryan Reynolds. “I’m wearing the shirt to embrace that idea,” Fillion says of fans’ ongoing passion for him to play a big-screen superhero (he does star in the upcoming superhero flick Super, playing the Holy Avenger). “But Ryan Reynolds is an excellent choice. I’ve got to say it. Anything extraordinary, you have to approach it with honesty. And that’s something Ryan Reynolds has always been able to do. From the moment I met him on Two Guys and a Girl, with the out-of-bounds kind of reality that his character had — Berg was always a little bit out of his mind – he always approached it with an honest reality.” I also told Fillion that it’s a good thing he didn’t wear an Ant-Man shirt, since there were already rumors swirling that he’d be joining old friend Joss Whedon’s The Avengers movie as the shrinking hero. “It’s too small!” he quips.
Photo courtesy of ABC
While the NBC sitcom Community may seem an odd choice to visit Comic-Con, it was fitting that star Donald Glover be a part of the event since fans on Twitter, Facebook and all over the Internet launched a campaign this spring for Glover to be the next cinematic Spider-Man. (Alas, it was not to be and the role was given to Andrew Garfield.) When asked if he has had time to comb the convention floor for another superhero to play on screen, Glover jokes, “I think I’m gonna go for Green Lantern. I know they’re making it already. I’ve worked out a way to kidnap Ryan Reynolds.” Since people have brought it up, Glover is open to the idea — “Who doesn’t want to play a superhero?” — yet he had some trepidation coming into Comic-Con after the Internet campaign on his behalf. “I was like, ‘Are people going to hate me? Am I going to be booed by nerds throwing iPhone cases at me?’ Like, ‘Leave me alone!’ ” he says, laughing. “But now it’s great. This is one of the only places in the world where people come together and celebrate their different loves. You could go to, I don’t know, a Lifehouse concert and everybody’s like, ‘We love Lifehouse!’ right? But here, it’s like, ‘We like Star Trek. We like Star Wars. You like that, that’s awesome!’ And that’s hard to find nowadays, and it’s a very special place because of that.”
Photo courtesy of NBC
After a Comic-Con panel yesterday that starred a live performance of The Big Bang Theory theme song by the Barenaked Ladies (who then rocked the Warner Bros. TV party later last night), the sitcom cast members talked about all their relationship dramas on the show, starting with the pairing of geek Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and his attractive neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco). Cuoco joked that she couldn’t remember what happened late last season, and Galecki reminded her, “We broke up.” “I don’t think we actually broke up,” she countered, with him adding, “Yeah, you never saw it. It had been discussed. It was mentioned in passing.” So what’s going to happen to the twosome in September when the CBS Monday night staple moves to Thursdays and begins its fourth season Sept. 23? “It’s going to be a long road,” Cuoco says. Galecki adds, “There’s obviously a deep-seeded caring that these two people share so they just have a lot to learn in the meantime. Not to say that they’re destined for one another either, but they’ll cross paths. There’s no way to not.” While Sheldon’s lovelife isn’t doing so well, Leonard’s lovably neurotic roommate Sheldon (two-time Emmy nominee Jim Parsons) found himself with a possible dating interest in the season finale, so read below for what the actor had to say about that situation.
Photos courtesy of CBS
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Today begins the onslaught of high-profile TV shows on display at Comic-Con, including the debut of AMC’s zombie drama The Walking Dead. While fans of the comic book anxiously wait to see some footage, star Andrew Lincoln is simply anxious to be in front of the Comic-Con crowd. “To be brutally honest, I am [freaking] terrified,” the British actor said in an interview yesterday. “But the other part is it’s so lovely because it’s about people who are deeply enthusiastic about something. And I’m one of these people who believe that everybody needs a hobby to be happy in their life. This is like enthusiasm to the power of enthusiasm. It’s a celebration of a genre, and I admire that. I’m an enthusiast for my work, so I can absolutely key into that. I’m all for new experiences, and I’m sure it will be one heck of a trip.” Other shows on tap for today include The Big Bang Theory, True Blood and the new TNT sci-fi series Falling Skies.
Photo courtesy of AMC
Will Ferrell kicked off the Megamind panel yesterday wearing blue facepaint and bringing donuts and juice to fans as his supervillain character from the animated movie, but he was surprised to find he was the only one who dressed up for the occasion. “I was expecting to look out into a sea of costumes when we walked on stage,” Ferrell said after the event in an interview with his co-star Tina Fey. It turns out that both A-listers fostered a love for Star Wars as children, although “I don’t have a depth of knowledge beyond Return of the Jedi,” Fey admitted. “I was C-3PO once for Halloween. Why wasn’t I Leia?” Ferrell said, “That’s so adorable. I did dress as someone from Planet of the Apes one Halloween as a kid. It was a homemade costume, that was pretty good.” Ferrell added that his kids have gone as Batman the past couple Halloweens, “even after a long deliberation of ‘I’ve got to get a costume this year! I can’t wait!’ And then it’s, ‘I like the Batman.’ It’s hard to beat.” Read below for what else happened on the first full day of Comic-Con.
Photos courtesy of DreamWorks, Lionsgate
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TRON fans were up bright and early yesterday morning waiting in line to catch the TRON: Legacy panel at Comic-Con, and they did not walk out disappointed. Director Joe Kasinski presented eight minutes of the sequel in full 3D — mostly comprised of Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), being aggressively indoctrinated into the computer world, but it also showed a fantastic lightcycle scene (as well as some lightjets!) and a younger, 35-year-old version of Jeff Bridges in the movie that Bridges’ Flynn plays against. Before the panel, though Kosinski, Hedlund and Bridges joined co-stars Olivia Wilde and Michael Sheen, the original Tron himself Bruce Boxleitner and other filmmakers for a press conference. Sheen said it was “amazing” to watch Wilde in the futuristic suits that had electroluminescent lamps installed in them. It made Bridges and Boxleitner harken back to the day when “all we had was spandex and magic markers,” Boxleitner joked. In the early 1980s, Bridges said, “it seemed like we were filming it in 3D.” The new world of TRON is definitely a spectacular one, so click here to get a glimpse at the trailer the Comic-Con audience saw yesterday.
Photo courtesy of Disney
Edgar Wright went from British filmmaker to Pied Piper in about the span of an hour tonight at the Comic-Con panel for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, his big-screen adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s popular indie graphic novel series in theaters Aug. 13. The director of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead moderated his own panel, following Sylvester Stallone and the testosterone-heavy Expendables presentation — “I’ve got 13 guests coming, and they don’t equal one Lundgren,” Wright quipped, referring to still-burly Expendables star Dolph Lundgren. Of course, those guests were pretty much his entire cast, from recent Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick to Michael Cera (who was decked out in a horrid Captain America costume, a jab at absent co-star Chris Evans) t0 one-time Superman Brandon Routh, who described his evil character Todd Ingram as “the opposite of Superman.” Wright finished up his panel by awarding those who got a “1-UP” button, out of the thousands given out at the beginning of the presentation, a chance to see the Scott Pilgrim movie at the nearby Balboa Theater in San Diego. Jumping the security gate in Hall H, he took a horde of fans on a 15-minute walk to the theater for a special screening. He wasn’t done, though. After the movie was over, Wright had the curtain lifted to reveal the buzz band Metric, which has a couple tracks on the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack and launched into a set of songs for head-bobbing fans. So how was the movie? Read below for my thoughts.
Photos courtesy of Universal Pictures
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The real action at Comic-Con doesn’t begin till later today, but last night’s Preview Night gave everybody a little bit of something fun. TV watchers had the chance to check out a special pilot screening of The CW’s Nikita, starring Maggie Q. Toy collectors stood in long lines for TRON, He-Man and other action figures. Comic fans found deals on their favorite books before the next few days get busy with panels. And movie and TV studios put a lot of effort into their booth displays. With Salt coming out this weekend, Angelina Jolie’s face was all over Sony’s booth. A lightcycle, a big, bad Recognizer and a really neat light-up hoodie were part of Disney’s TRON display. (Check out this clip for more.) And The Walking Dead really set the stage for zombie drama — literally, the booth for the AMC show was set up as the inside of a cabin, complete with deer heads on the wall and lifeless, bloody, crusty members of the undead with whom fans could take their picture. It was a relative calm before the storm of today, where people will arrive early to get a peek at the TRON panel in the morning and also presentations for Red, The Expendables and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which has set up a whole party area for con-goers across the street from the San Diego Convention Center. Follow my Twitter feed for detailed reports and the USA WEEKEND feed for highlights — plus retweet our USA WEEKEND missives for a chance to win a copy of The Losers on DVD. Also, I’m going to feature videos of some of the many interesting characters I see at Comic-Con, starting with this woman who was all decked out as the Batman bad girl Harley Quinn.
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We are officially at Comic-Con International! We hope all of our readers are ready for five days of epic pop-culture news, scoop and interviews. If you missed any of our Comic-Con coverage so far this week, check it out with this link. And if you’re on Twitter, you can follow our USA WEEKEND flagship feed for highlights as well as my feed, which is for the hardcore fans who want to know EVERYTHING that is going on. So get ready for some tweeting from Preview Night tonight. Remember: Starting today, we’re giving away copies of The Losers on DVD every day we’re at Comic-Con to five random people who RT our tweets that day (which have the #sdcc hashtag), and on Friday we’ll be giving five high-definition Blu-rays! We know you might not be able to be one of the 125,000 people checking out the latest in movies, TV and other genre of entertainment, and that’s why we’re out to give you the best coverage around. And if you’re all about owning your own little piece of pop-culture coolness and missing out on the trademark Comic-Con exclusives, we’re hit to help you out there, too. Read below for some exclusives that I can’t wait to see and that you’ll be able to get your hands on, too.
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TV shows have never been out in force like they are this year at Comic-Con. It’s the place where series such as Psych and Smallville can reconnect with their core fan base, and where people can see pilots and footage of new series that could hold their attention. Fringe had its debut two years ago, and V last year — this year, No Ordinary Family and Nikita are being rolled out for the con contingent. I am lucky enough this year to be involved with some of the TV goings-on, as I’ll be moderating the Supernatural panel on Sunday featuring creator Eric Kripke, new showrunner Sera Gamble, fan favorites Misha Collins and Jim Beaver, and the CW show’s big stars, Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki. (Perhaps I will get a question in every so often in between all the screams for those two!) There are other must-see presentations to be had, though, so read below for my top 10 TV list. Let us know what TV shows you’re most interesting in, and check out this sneak preview of the new NBC show The Cape, starring David Lyons and Keith David.
Photos courtesy of Warner Bros. TV, CBS, Showtime
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