No, the weekly pop culture news recap isn’t going to become a regular Monday thing. This time we were just waiting for all the announcements and reveals to come out of San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC). There’s a lot to cover from the past several days, so let’s start right now.

Film

First up, closer to home, animated movies out of Japan continue to be a major drawcard at South African cinemas. So much so that fans can look forward to a dedicated anime film festival, running at movie houses in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town for a month.

Made a reality by Gravel Road Distribution Group, the first ever Animé Festival 2024 will be a celebration of the work of iconic Studio Ghibli, starting with the rerelease of My Neighbour Totoro on Thursday 8 August. The opportunity to watch this classic on the big screen will be followed by Oscar-winning Spirited Away on 23 August, and Howl’s Moving Castle on 6 September.

Paired with the screenings will be cultural events and activations such as tea tastings, fan art displays, cosplay and more. Details will be shared on Gravel Road’s social pages.

Cinemas participating in Animé Festival 2024 include Ster-Kinekor Eastgate, Mall of Africa, The Zone@ Rosebank, Cavendish Square, Somerset Mall, Tyger Valley, V&A Waterfront, Gateway Theatre of Shopping, and Bayside Mall, as well as independent favourites The Bioscope and The Labia.

Tickets for the Anime Film Festival 2024 will be available at Ster-Kinekor cinemas at a special price of R75 per ticket per film (no club discounts applicable).

Out of interest, the logo for Animé Festival 2024 was sourced from a design competition, and you can see all the entries (and eventual winner) here.

Still not San Diego Comic-Con related, but comic-centred at least, is the first full-length trailer (following an initial teaser) for Joker: Folie À Deux, the sequel to filmmaker Todd Phillips’s Oscar-winning Joker, an alternate, gritty take on the most famous Batman villain of them all.

Joaquin Phoenix is back as Arthur Fleck/Joker, who this time is institutionalised at Arkham Asylum while awaiting trial for his crimes. There he meets fellow inmate Harleen Quinzel/Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) and in shared madness they find love… and music. Yes, Joker: Folie À Deux is part musical. The film comes to cinemas, including IMAX, on 4 October, exactly five years after Joker debuted and stunned cinemagoers.

Horror thriller Speak No Evil crept up on us almost out of nowhere. Coming to cinemas on 13 September is this tale of an American family who befriend their British equivalent while holidaying in Europe and accept an invitation to visit the latter’s remote country home. But an idyllic breakaway quickly spirals into a nightmare.

Based on the Danish Gæsterne, Speak No Evil stars James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy and Aisling Franciosi. The film is written for the screen and directed by Eden lake and The Woman in Black’s James Watkins.

Of course there was a huge Hall H Marvel panel at Comic-Con this past weekend, and with it came two key pieces of information.

One: to set it apart from two (actually three if you count the Roger Corman 90s adaptation) Fantastic Four films, next year’s release will now be called The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Pedro Pascal (as Reed Richards/Mr Fantasic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/The Human Torch, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/The Thing) star as Marvel’s First Family, while Ralph Ineson is world devouring villain Galactus.

Then there was the dramatic reveal that not only with the Russo Brothers officially be returning to the MCU to direct the next two Avengers movies, but there’s a returning star as well. Thanks to multiversal shenanigans, Robert Downey Jr. will be playing Victor Von Doom – or at least one variant of the brilliant, armoured villain – in Avengers: Doomsday come May 2026. Doomsday will be followed by Avengers: Secret Wars one year later, in May 2027.

Avengers: Doomsday is clearly a narrative pivot after the Jonathan Majors assault charges mooted story plans centred on Kang the Conqueror. The next Avengers team-up was to be Avengers: Kang Dynasty, but in addition to the Majors firing, big screen MCU Phase 5 projects involving the character had been underwhelming.

As with Joker, there’s a new trailer (following this reveal) for Hellboy: The Crooked Man.

With the involvement of character creator Mike Mignola, and Crank and Happy! director Brian Taylor, Hellboy: The Crooked Man looks to be leaning harder into horror than previous Hellboy movies.

Replacing Ron Perlman and David Harbour, Jack Kesy is the half-demon title character, who here is early in his career fighting supernatural evil. Set in 1950s rural Appalachia, Hellboy and fellow Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) must confront the malevolent Crooked Man, who is tied up in local legends about witchcraft and possession.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man is out at some point during the Northern Hemisphere autumn.

Finally, wrapping this week’s movie section, audiences got their first proper look at the next stop-motion animated effort from Coraline, ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings studio LAIKA. Out next year is Wildwood, a dark fantasy based on the novel by Colin Meloy, lead singer and songwriter for The Decemberists, and illustrated by Carson Ellis. While the film adaptation was revealed back in September 2021, it actually had already been in development for a decade by that point.

The basic storyline of Wildwood sees adolescent Prue McKeel (revealed below) and her geeky best friend Curtis venture into a hidden, magical forest in Oregon after Prue’s baby brother Mac is kidnapped by crows.

See another exclusive image from Empire Magazine, and read a short interview with director Travis Knight, here.

Series

SDCC held a packed Star Trek panel, covering multiple upcoming projects. However, we were a bit more interested in the Doctor Who news to come from the convention. Like a new Doctor Who spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea. This five-part series centres on UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), the military body that has popped up on Doctor Who and other spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. With the Doctor nowhere in sight, UNIT must step into action when an ancient species emerges from the ocean to challenge life on earth.

Co-written by past and present Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies, in The War Between the Land and the Sea, Russell Tovey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw star respectively as Alonso Frame, a junior officer on the spaceship Titanic, and Tish Jones, sister of former companion Martha.

Meanwhile, the 2024 Doctor Who Christmas Special is already shaping up. Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan plays the title character in Joy to the World, alongside Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor. Steven Moffat is the writer behind this year’s Christmas special, which will be screening on Disney+ outside the UK, and on BBC iPlayer, followed by BBC One, in the show’s British homeland.

Soon to join the ranks of small screen video game adaptations is Prime Video’s Like a Dragon: Yakuza, based on SEGA’s beloved series about organised crime in the fictional Tokyo district of Kamurochō. Ryoma Takeuchi plays lead character Kazuma Kiryu, AKA “the Dragon of Dojima,” a fierce and loyal yakuza who falls under the Tojo Clan.

Crime drama Like a Dragon: Yakuza starts streaming from 24 October.

When we spoke to Sean Gunn at Comic Con Cape Town earlier this year, one of the things the actor spoke most passionately about was animated series Creature Commandos, which sees him once again collaborating with older brother James, now head of the DC filmic universe.

Courtesy of SDCC, we now have a teaser trailer for the antihero ensemble, Amanda Waller’s follow-up to the Suicide Squad, which comes to Max in December. Consisting of seven episodes, Creature Commandos features the voices of Anya Chalotra, Frank Grillo, Sean Gunn, David Harbour, Alan Tudyk, Indira Varma, and Viola Davis.

We knew that Minnie Driver was voicing one of the characters in Prime Video’s Batman: Caped Crusader, the spiritual successor to 90s classic cartoon Batman: The Animated Series. Now we know exactly who that character is. A screening of the first Caped Crusader episode at SDCC revealed Driver will be a fresh, gender swapped take on The Penguin, now known as as Oswalda Cobblepot. Brace for outrage!

All 10 episodes of Season 1 of Batman: Caped Crusader drop on 1 August. Matt Reeves, J.J. Abrams and Bruce Timm are behind the animated reimagining.

Comics & Books

SDCC plays host to the comic industry’s most prestigious accolades, the Eisner Awards. You can check out all the categories, nominees and winners for 2024 here, but the highlights include:

  • Roaming, by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki – about three Canadian college students visiting New York City for a spring break trip in 2009 – won in all three of its nominated categories: Best Graphic Album, Best Writer, and Best Penciller/Inker.
  • Best New Series went to Somna: A Bedtime Story, by Becky Cloonan and Tula Lotay.
  • Best Ongoing Series was awarded to Transformers, by Daniel Warren Johnson, who also won Best Writer/Artist.
  • Lore Olympus was named Best Webcomic for the third year in a row for creator Rachel Smythe.

Also news out of SDCC, Gail Simone will be writing James Bond as of October for Dynamite Comics. One of Simone’s most celebrated runs as a writer has until now been her stint on Red Sonja, also for Dynamite. Simone is currently writing the relaunched Uncanny X-Men for Marvel, with the first issue out 7 August.

Speaking of X-Men, announced at the Women of Marvel panel at Comic-Con, Erica Schultz (currently already on Daredevil, Blood Hunters, and Venomous for Marvel) is back writing Laura Kinney, AKA X-23 in a brand new series, with Giada Belviso on art duties. Following the fall of Krakoa, mutants are more oppressed than ever, and Laura steps up to defend her kind, unafraid to use her signature violent methods and unstoppable determination.

Laura Kinney: Wolverine #1 hits shelves this December.

Gaming

We’ve got just one standout gaming story for this week, and that’s the video game performers’ strike, underway as of this past Friday. Following the lead of their film and TV brethren, this sub-division of union SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) is specifically seeking protections around the use of AI. Negotiations had been ongoing with major game studios since 2022, and this is the second game performers’ strike. Voice actors and motion capture performers last walked away from the job in 2016. That strike lasted 11 months.