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San Diego Comic-Con: Ranking the film trailers

It was slim pickings this year at the San Diego Comic-Con. The largest event of its kind normally has a bevy of film announcements, usually presented in Hall H, the Con's largest event space, that make their way to the internet soon after. It's a place where studios and distributors can build hype for something they're nervous about -- one need only look at how the SDCC trailer for Iron Man helped to convince skeptical nerds that the movie might actually, you know, be good for proof of that -- or they can single-handedly sink your chances at pleasing a small but stupidly loud demographic if your film looks bad. Both Game of Thrones and Marvel Studios skipped Comic-Con this year, and a number of the bigger studios including Fox and Sony whittled down their involvement to a handful of titles, so the bombast just wasn't there.

Still, what we did see was interesting, and it seems, much like nature, Comic-Con abhors a vacuum, so the film press ate up some truly dreadful trailers and convinced themselves that they were "good" and worth the same kind of breathless coverage that something like Black Panther would have gotten last year. So we're here to give you a more impartial look at what the public saw at Comic-Con this year, via the trailers that came out of it.

We unfortunately can't include the clips from Venom, The Predator, Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse, or Wonder Woman 1984 because, alas, they weren't officially put online and we don't want to get sued.

So, on with the trailers, ranked from worst to first:

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Shazam!

We disagree with this adaptation on an ideological level as well as on an execution one, as the Geoff Johns-written run upon which this film is based is symptomatic with DC’s worst impulse as a publisher: their capitulations to fans who want their heroes to have a “gritty” tone. Billy Batson’s just a good kid, not a jaded, sarcastic-ass orphan (are there any DC characters anymore who aren’t orphans?), and, we mean, maybe it might be cool to have his sidekick — you know, the kid who is bullied and disabled — have the chance to be a badass superhero? But, no, we just need to have a glowering white kid transform into the dude from Chuck. That’s just fucking great.

Look, we don’t hate everything about this trailer: it’s cool that Djimon Hounsou is playing Shaza- oh, we mean the Wizard, now that the superhero is called “Shazam” now and not Captain Marvel, and we’re kind of pumped to see whatever goofiness Mark Strong is up to as well. But this is still a DCEU movie through and through, so of course we’re skeptical. It’s not like they need a W particularly bad, given that Wonder Woman annihilated minds last year, but people are out here overhyping this movie like it’s the second coming of Christ.

Also: “bullet immunity?” Really? You have screenwriters making hundreds of thousands of dollars to write that? That’s the most awkward verbiage to emerge from a young actor’s mouth since Joseph Gordon-Levitt played Cobra Commander a decade ago.

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