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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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Aquaman

Now this is a bit more like it. Sure, the humor isn’t particularly good, Mera’s costume still is just terrible, and the Indiana Jones-styled sections of this film look to be a bit more of a forced shift in color palette so that people don’t get sick of looking at a blue-tinted screen, but this movie looks N-U-T-S. And we mean that positively! This trailer is so packed full of crazy shit, ranging from the design down to the effects work to the massive scale on which some of these underwater battles are taking place, that we don’t even mind that we didn’t see Dolph Lundgren in this trailer. And yes, he’s in the movie, thank you for asking.

There really is something kind of admirable about a DC movie willing to go this broad and wacky in the face of an overwhelming corporate incentive not to, and director James Wan looks like he’s taken this one to some unexpected visual places. Jason Momoa is still bringing his DTV action charms to this character (God forbid, we got some Seagal douche chills when he breaks into the sub), and overall, this just looks like a fun and hammy time. It’s a good way of showing what DC can do differently than Marvel without giving into the grim-dark tonal temptations or ripping off the other company’s aesthetics.

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