WonderCon 2010 Wrap Up – Comics, Movies, TV, and More in the City by the Bay!

If you weren’t following our updates from the convention via Twitter, what’s wrong with you?! Didn’t your mother teach you better? Were you born in a barn?
Start following me now so that you’re prepared for the unfiltered madness to come as we hover silently in the corner of some of the year’s biggest upcoming events, such as E3, San Diego Comic-Con, Star Wars Celebration V, and more! twitter.com/popculturegeek
Also check out our pictures from the event on Flickr.

For those of you who don’t know, WonderCon is the San Francisco-based little sister to the mega-sized San Diego Comic-Con. At about 1/4 the size of the San Diego convention, WonderCon gives fans a little more breathing room to soak up comics related goodies, events, and more. Sure, the movie studios definitely made themselves known more than ever this year, with Disney, Warner Bros, and Lionsgate showing off what they’re bringing to theaters in the coming months (Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Toy Story 3, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Resident Evil: Afterlife, The Losers, Nightmare on Elm Street, Splice, Inception, and of course, the ubiquitous Kick-Ass). Directors Christopher Nolan, Lee Unkrich, and John Turteltaub, and stars like Nicolas Cage, Jay Baruchel, Jackie Earle Haley, Jake Gyllenhaal, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Milla Jovovich, and Jeff Garlin all came out to show off new footage and take questions from the standing room only crowds.

Disney went above and beyond to promote Tron: Legacy by hosting a press conference with the fictional ENCOM Industries a mile from the Moscone convention center. Alan Bradley (actor Bruce Boxleitner) addressed the crowd and announced a new online version of Space Paranoids will be launched very soon (a game that never really existed except in the Tron movie universe). Those loyal to Tron creator Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) overtook the stage to voice their outrage over ENCOM’s lack of initiative in finding the missing genius, followed by an ENCOM helicopter swooping over the crowd and a man parachuting from it to the stage at the end of the event. It was reported that the jumper was actually Kevin Flynn‘s son, Sam (actor Garrett Hedlund). It obviously wasn’t the actor who plummeted to the ground on that cold, windy night, but it was fun pretending we were part of a movie’s back story for just one night. And, hey, we got free t-shirts and posters and Space Paranoids pins. More information on the mysterious goings-on at ENCOM can be found at FlynnLives.com.

 
Television was also well-represented with special advanced screenings of the new Doctor Who and panels focusing on Happy Town, V, Fringe, Human Target, and perennial fan-favorite: Chuck. Many of the panels featured full screenings of upcoming episodes, hoping to catch the interest of non-viewers and reward longtime fans of the shows for sticking with them. Chuck, with easily the strongest representation of fans, is still astoundingly on the chopping block after this season. I don’t understand how that is, but apparently Nielsens don’t lie. Or they’re outdated and not nearly as effective at gauging viewer interest as it had been decades ago when it was created to track viewing patterns and numbers. But that’s my opinion. So’s this: Chuck is an amazingly fun and exciting show with a talented cast and deserves a long life on the now digital airwaves. I’m sick of worrying if a series will get canceled before it is allowed to get proper closure, like Lost, but unlike Veronica Mars. Hopefully Warner Bros (studio) and NBC Universal (network) will take notice at our fervor and keep it around for a long time to come. But I’m not holding my breath.

But beyond movie and television properties, the show is about comics. All of the major publishers were well represented (although Marvel, considering it’s one of the Big Two, could have had a bigger presence… or any presence) in booths and panels for their various properties. Actor Michael Chiklis (The Shield) showed up to promote a new book he co-created for IDW called the Pantheon. He’s one of my favorite actors from one of my all-time favorite tv series. Unfortunately, due to the madness that comes with personal schedule management, I didn’t get to meet him.

The evenings held an array of geeky opportunities, such as the Doctor Who new season premiere screening, the annual Masquerade (tons of hand-made fan costumes), and an advance screening of Kick-Ass to which hundreds of passes were handed out, most of which went unused due to the fact that nearly a 3rd of the seats were reserved for a local radio station promotion, not WonderCon guests who stood in line for hours in hopes of seeing the film (including yours truly). Yeah, not a big fan of that. It was the single biggest disappointment of the week, not only for myself, but also for people who drove from out of state to stand in multiple lines throughout the day only to get turned away, with no hope of a later screening (I was told their “digital license” ran out at 11pm. Can’t the studio that owns it have control over that?) to assuage the anger of the hundreds who wasted hours in line for nothing. If you’re going invite WonderCon attendees to an advanced screening, it should be for WonderCon attendees only. If I had known, I would have tried to get a hook up from the local radio station instead, since they had 5 rows of the 500 seat room reserved just for them. Big sigh.

In all, despite the Kick-Ass fiasco and the rain, it was another great weekend in the city by the bay, courtesy of WonderCon. I grabbed the goodies, snatched up the swag, and got a sneak preview of what’s to come in the world of movies, tv, video games, and, of course, comics in 2010 and beyond…