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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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Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Well, we already know that the King of Monsters will be destroying Boston in this new movie, but we’re also kind of heartened by the visual approach this movie is taking to its giant kaiju characters — not to say that Gareth Edwards’ entry in the series wasn’t occasionally visually stunning, but it was frustrating all the same.

This looks kind of beautiful, especially with the way Mothra is presented in this trailer, with that stunning blue light behind her. It’s nice to see the color palette of this film shift away from the red-and-brown that highlighted a lot of the first one, and move towards a blue, cooler look more befitting its tone. The only thing we’re slightly worried about is that this might be a divorce metaphor that’s too on the nose — Millie Bobby Brown being the in-universe daughter of Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga after all — but we have faith that Trick ‘R Treat director Michael Dougherty will keep this in check. But Goddamn, are we excited for this.

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