The most exciting Comic-Con announcements and wildest moments from SDCC 2025
Comic-Con remains a highlight of the geek calendar. SDCC encourages the big names from the worlds of movies, TV, and comic books to peddle their wares in front of an adoring crowd. Last year, for example, Marvel used the famous Hall H stage to announce that Robert Downey Jr. would be returning to the MCU — as the villainous Doctor Doom rather than Tony Stark.
There were fewer fireworks in California this year with a more muted event. Marvel sat out entirely, while competitor DC mostly let its recently released Superman movie do the talking. But that's not to say that there weren't any big moments and notable announcements for fans to enjoy.
Here's a round-up of the most important things that happened at Comic-Con over the weekend, from new trailers to appearances from pop culture legends.
James Gunn finally unveiled Peacemaker season 2
There might have been a shortage of big superhero movie news out of Comic-Con this year, but that's not to say DC was completely quiet. James Gunn might have been busy kicking off a whole new superhero universe, but he still had time for John Cena's bizarre vigilante Peacemaker. The trailer for season two teases lots of silliness, as well as the tantalising idea of portals between dimensions — perhaps a nod to the very confusing DCU chronology since Gunn's takeover.
Read more: The Superman movies ranked worst to best according to fans (Yahoo Entertainment, 6 min read)
Gunn also got something of a hero's welcome at this year's SDCC as those in attendance thanked him for shepherding Superman back to the big screen. "The reason I'm so happy to be here with you guys, is because this is the real fans here," he said on stage.
Avengers: Doomsday might not have a finished script
Marvel didn't have an actual presence in San Diego this year, but that didn't stop the upcoming team-up movie Avengers: Doomsday from grabbing some headlines. Rebecca Romijn — aka the original Mystique in the X-Men movies — was at Comic-Con promoting Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but she gave an intriguing answer when asked whether she had finished shooting her scenes for Doomsday.
"[I'm] not quite sure. The script hasn't — they haven't finished writing it. It's been very, very fun, and we don't know yet. They keep everything very close to the vest themselves in an effort to keep everything under wraps," she said according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Just over a year away from the release of Marvel's first Avengers movie since Endgame, the script apparently isn't complete. That could be a warning sign or just yet another symptom of Marvel's bizarre secrecy. The fact Romijn doesn't know of a finished script doesn't mean that there isn't one.
George Lucas was in the house
Until this year, George Lucas had never taken to the stage at Comic-Con. The Star Wars creator, however, broke his duck this year by sitting down with Guillermo del Toro for a panel discussing the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. The museum will house lots of Star Wars pieces, as well as other art including early Flash Gordon drawings and paintings by Frida Kahlo.
Read more: George Lucas says perseverance is key to filmmaking: 'I fought for all my films' (PA Media, 3 min read)
'[Art] is more about a connection and emotional connection with the work, not how much it cost or what celebrity did it," said Lucas. "I don't think it's anything that anybody else can tell you. If you have emotional connection, it's art. If you don't, just move onto the next painting."
Star Wars fans also got a glimpse of Eman Esfandi as Ezra Bridger in the currently filming second season of Ahsoka. As for any concrete updates on that show, they were in short supply.
Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is going much bigger
Five Nights at Freddy's managed to parlay its video game success to the big screen in 2023, with the movie adaptation of the creepy game earning a massive $291m (£217m) worldwide. Returning director Emma Tammi unveiled a trailer and also promised that the new movie would feature 'more than three times as many animatronics' as its predecessor, praising the Jim Henson Company for realising the critters as practically as possible.
Among those new animatronics will be Mangle and The Marionette, who will be very recognisable to fans of the games. Based on how many of those fans turned up to buy a ticket first time around, catering squarely to their tastes seems like a very smart move.
Coyote vs. Acme saga gets a happy ending
Two years ago, Warner Bros announced that it was chucking a completed movie in the bin. Coyote vs. Acme, which is a live-action and animation hybrid featuring Looney Tunes characters, was scrapped in favour of a tax write-off. After a fervent campaign online, though, the studio reversed course and allowed Ketchup Entertainment to nab the rights to the movie earlier this year.
Read more: Will Forte debuts first 'Coyote vs. Acme' footage, calls initial Warner Bros. cancellation 'devastating' (Entertainment Weekly, 4 min read)
At Comic-Con, Ketchup announced that the film will land in US cinemas on 28 August 2026 and also revealed that Bugs Bunny is in line for a cameo appearance. That's more than enough to whet the appetite of fans who have been following this long-running rollercoaster of a story.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds goes Jim Henson
The Jim Henson Company got a major shout-out during the Five Nights at Freddy's panel, but that wasn't the only time the world of the Muppets graced Hall H this year. In a short preview clip for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4, fans saw Anson Mount's character Captain Pike in the form of one of the Henson Company's puppets. That's set to be a memorable episode indeed.
Predator franchise unveils Arnold Schwarzenegger cameo
It's a big year for the Predator franchise, with animated movie Predator: Killer of Killers already streaming and live-action adventure Predator: Badlands on the way very soon. Dan Trachtenberg, who directed both projects, appeared at Comic-Con armed with the first 15 minutes of Badlands and a very interesting additional detail for Killer of Killers.
'Unfortunately, some bits of Killer of Killers were left on the cutting room floor, but recently we were able to sneak it back in," said Trachtenberg. He then played a changed version of the animated movie's epilogue, revealing Danny Glover's Lt. Mike Harrigan and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch from the original 1987 Predator movie as warriors captured by the creatures this time around. That footage will be added to the existing streaming release this week.
Read more: Predator: Badlands makes the monstrous hunter a hero. Here's what to know about the sequel (Business Insider, 3 min read)
Trachtenberg said of meeting Schwarzenegger to discuss the cameo: "We talked a lot about the things we could make together and he was very kind to approve his cameo in this. And we can now continue to cook up things that may be in store for that guy.'
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
The comedic rockers of Spinal Tap are back, with Rob Reiner returning to direct a sequel to the classic 1980s mockumentary. Reiner appeared at Comic-Con to debut a packed trailer for the movie, which features A-list music biz cameos from Paul McCartney and Elton John. It's almost certainly the only trailer this year to feature a Beatle and a Taskmaster star, in Kerry Godliman.
Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer all return to their famous roles in the sequel and Reiner, for his part, praised the celebs who popped up. 'I was surprised at how good Paul McCartney was at improv,' said the filmmaker.
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A Disney spokesman declined to comment for the story. Iger's legacy In 2019, when CEO Bob Iger was both on the precipice of launching Disney+ and planning to retire, he positioned the new streaming platform as a key part his legacy — the thing that would carry the company through its next era and reposition the company not only as an entertainment juggernaut but also a tech giant. 'The decision to disrupt businesses that are fundamentally working but whose future is in question – intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hopes of generating long-term growth – requires no small amount of courage,' Iger wrote in his book, 'The Ride of a Lifetime.' The service launched on November 12, 2019, with a ton of Disney catalogue titles and a handful of new ones. The new shows and movies all had ties to legacy Disney hits, including 'Lady and the Tramp' and 'Toy Story.' But the headliner was 'The Mandalorian,' the first-ever live-action 'Star Wars' series. Every lever was pulled to help support the launch of this new initiative. There were activations in the Disney Parks, an elaborate press junket where journalists bopped from room to room interviewing talent from shows debuting with the service and countless articles written about the platform. At the time of launch, The New York Times said that Disney+ 'is the industry's equivalent of Thor's slamming down his magic hammer: a quake that changes everything.' And while the service started strong, it really took off during lockdown when the COVID-19 pandemic turned the entire industry upside down. Disney+ served as a lifeline for the entire company, which had its theme parks closed and cruise ships grounded. A year after the launch, Disney announced that it had over 94.9 million subscribers. It beat its four-year goal in just 14 months. As an economic engine, Disney+ did what it was supposed to do. But creatively, it would sap the company's brands of their singular oomph. A galaxy far, far away 'The Mandalorian' kicked off Disney+ and it was an undeniable hit. People went crazy for Jon Favreau's lone gunslinger and, in particular, his diminutive sidekick, who people quickly referred to as Baby Yoda. It arrived a month before the ninth film in the 'Star Wars' film saga, 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,' hit theaters. In its first week, it racked up 791 million minutes watched, according to Nielsen. That early success opened the floodgates for multiple 'Star Wars'-centered projects a year. 'When you went to a Star Wars movie, it used to be special,' said a marketing exec from a rival studio. 'But there's a difference between let's have a movie every four years versus let's have three shows on the air all the time and have a movie every year.' A year after the premiere of 'The Mandalorian,' during the Investors Day event, the company unveiled a host of 'Star Wars'-related content coming to Disney+ — much of which, 10 years later, has yet to materialize. But at that point, Disney was in a groove. 'The Mandalorian' had just returned two months before the event, and the first week of Season 2 saw 1 billion minutes watched. The show averaged more than a billion minutes watched every week through the rest of the year and peaked in the week of its season finale at 1.34 billion minutes. Then came the first red flag. 'The Book of Boba Fett' debuted a year after that. At first glance, the show's premise of fleshing out a fan-favorite character seemed like a sure-fire hit. But its uneven story and mixed pacing turned off viewers, and despite the re-emergence of the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda towards the end, it wrangled 885 million minutes watched in its final week — a good number, but nowhere near the heights of 'The Mandalorian.' Subsequent series like 'Obi-Wan Kenobi' would start off strong (1.02 billion minutes in the first week) before tapering off (860 million in the final week). 'Obi-Wan' would kick off a trend that the two other Star Wars shows would follow: views that would fall week to week, suggesting flagging interest. 'Ahsoka' started with 829 million views in its first week, with views falling by 31 percent by the finale. Likewise, 'The Acolyte' similarly lost nearly a third of its viewership over the span of its 10-week run. Despite setting itself up for another season, it was quickly canceled. 'Ahsoka' will be back for a second season, at least. 'Skeleton Crew,' a 'Goonies'-like take on Star Wars featuring a young cast getting into hijinks with space pirates that debuted at the end of 2024, never even made the top 10, so there isn't data available from Nielsen. Finally, there's 'Andor,' the rare critical hit that proved to be the exception to the Disney+ curse. It ended the first season with 674 million minutes streamed in the final week having steadily built up its audience. By the end of its second season, the number leaped to 931 million minutes streamed as critics and audiences alike heaped praise upon its mature themes. What's important to keep in mind, is that throughout this whole period when Lucasfilm emphasized 'Star Wars' series on Disney+, not a single 'Star Wars' movie was released theatrically. At its height, following the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney and the successful relaunch of the franchise with 2015's 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens,' Disney was releasing a new 'Star Wars' movie every year. 'The biggest problem with Disney+ is not the quality of the material,' said Dan Zehr, the host of the Coffee with Kenobi podcast and an author who has written books for Lucasfilm. 'It's that less is more. The less Star Wars we have, the more it builds the anticipation.' Next year, we'll finally get a new 'Star Wars' movie and instead of an original story or a continuation of the saga installments, it will be an expansion of 'The Mandalorian' – a big-screen movie directed by creator Jon Favreau called 'The Mandalorian and Grogu.' In 2027, 'Star Wars: Starfighter,' directed by Shawn Levy and starring Ryan Gosling, will arrive in theaters. But besides a second season of 'Ahsoka,' there are currently no new live-action 'Star Wars' series that have been announced. After years of being bombarded with 'Star Wars' series on Disney+, to diminishing returns, the franchise is returning to the big screen. Will 'Star Wars' be special again? Or, as Zehr put it, 'To me, Star Wars is a dining experience, it's not fast food. When you make it like fast food, it suffers.' Trouble in the MCU The first year that Marvel Studios started producing series for Disney+ there were four big budget live-action series ('WandaVision,' 'The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,' 'Loki' and 'Hawkeye'). In 2022, there were three ('Moon Knight,' 'Ms. Marvel' and 'She-Hulk: Attorney at Law') with two in 2023 (the second season of 'Loki' and 'Secret Invasion'). There were two shows in 2024 ('Echo' and 'Agatha All Along') and there have been two so far this year ('Daredevil: Born Again' and 'Ironheart'), with a third on the way later this year ('Wonder Man'). 'I do think that it has eroded the branding,' said Dave Gonzales, the co-author of the indispensable history of Marvel Studios, 'MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios.' 'All of the sub-brands have been eroded.' For Marvel, he said, it's particularly interesting because it followed a period of being at the top of the industry. 'They were finally getting to do what they wanted to do – put everything in development.' Feige acknowledged this at the press event, saying that they suddenly had access to big stars who wanted to do more esoteric projects with the studio, citing Oscar Isaac wanting to do 'Moon Knight' as a reason to greenlight it. Other projects, like 'Hawkeye,' started off as features before being reconfigured, just as 'Obi-Wan Kenobi' had been, into a limited streaming series. There were also specials (dubbed 'Special Presentations') like 'Werewolf by Night' and 'The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.' Before the Disney+ era began, Feige promised that the entire thing would be connected – series would lead into movies and then back to series, in a giant, interconnected loop. But they ran into problems almost immediately, with the global pandemic impacting productions and even the rollout of series (for instance, 'WandaVision' was originally meant to come out after 'Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness' and then had to be reconfigured to tee up that sequel, which also starred Elisabeth Olsen). 'Marvel remade how they made franchise movies but they thought they could do the same thing with television – you can't,' said Gonzales. 'They think they're more nimble than they actually are.' With 'WandaVision,' Gonzales said, they moved the movie pipeline to a television pipeline and ended up with shows that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. 'We'll never have TV shows that cost that much again,' he added. And while there have been a handful of hit Marvel Studios series on Disney+, most notably 'WandaVision,' which on its most watched week pulled down an impressive 924 million minutes streamed, per Nielsen, its spinoff 'Agatha All Along,' which racked up 744 million minutes in its final week, plus 'Loki,' with two episodes from its first season topping 1 billion minutes streamed, the majority of them failed to make waves. 'Ironheart,' the latest MCU show featuring a tech-savvy armored heroine based in Chicago, garnered just 563 million minutes streamed in its final week in July. The chilling effect of these shows have extended to the films, with 'Captain America: Brave New World' ($415 million) and 'Thunderbolts' ($380 million) both underperforming at the box office. Notably, 'Deadpool & Wolverine' ($1.3 billion) and 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' ($118 million opening weekend) have performed well because they're so detached from the rest of the MCU and Disney+ shows, but even 'Fantastic Four' is showing cracks with its drastic dropoff at the box office in its second weekend. Feige said that the studio felt the residual effects of people thinking, 'I had to have seen these other shows to understand who this is.' But when looking at what happened to Pixar, the Avengers should consider themselves lucky. Pixar's problems Back in 2019, Disney corporate leaned on Pixar to supply new material for the streaming service, which is difficult when the pipelines for Pixar's features and shorts are so rigidly solidified. At first, the contributions were minor, such as the micro-length Toy Story spin-off 'Forky Asks a Question,' with total running time coming in at around 30 minutes per series. Disney+'s demands for content got more ambitious. The company, under CEO Bob Chapek (who was subsequently replaced by a returning Iger), sent three Pixar original films (2020's 'Soul,' 2021's 'Luca' and 2022's 'Turning Red') directly to Disney+. There was the sensation that families were concerned about going to movie theaters, so Disney delivered new Pixar movies directly into their homes. But when 'Lightyear,' an expansion of the 'Toy Story' franchise but ostensibly a new IP, was released in the summer of 2022, it underperformed, making just $226.4 million globally. 'Elemental,' another Pixar original released the following summer, underperformed initially before making nearly $500 million worldwide through strong word of mouth. And while last year's 'Inside Out 2' was a phenomenon, making $1.69 billion worldwide, this summer's 'Elio' has struggled, making just $139 million worldwide and becoming the first Pixar movie not to break $100 million domestically. ('Onward,' released a few days before the pandemic in 2020, didn't meet that mark but if it had stayed in theaters, it would have.) In 2023, the New York Times proclaimed that 'Pixar is damaged as a big-screen brand.' Elsewhere in the same article, the report noted that 'as some box office analysts speculated, Disney had weakened the Pixar brand by using its films to build the Disney+ streaming service.' 'When you had an original Pixar movie, it was like, It's going to be huge,' said the marketing exec at a rival studio. 'The brand is so devalued because they put those movies on Disney+, not every Pixar movie is a theatrical event.' Like Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm, Disney has pumped the brakes on Disney+-specific Pixar material. Last year saw the release of 'Dream Productions,' a three-episode spinoff of 'Inside Out 2' focused on the studio that produces Riley's dreams. It was followed by 'Win or Lose,' which streamed on Disney+ earlier this year. It's one of the best things that the studio has ever made — eight half-hour episodes about a softball team, with each installment told from a different player's point-of-view (or their coach or their parent…) The show fared OK — Nielsen said that it earned 6.2 million viewers in the U.S. over the first 35 days – but making a direct-to-streaming show disrupted Pixar's pipeline, pulling resources away from features and costing as much as one of those bigger projects. A long-form streaming series that was meant to follow 'Win or Lose' was quietly canceled and may get reworked into a feature at Pixar. And there hasn't been anything announced, long or short, on the Pixar side of things. The damage has been done. The survivors Not every Disney brand has taken a huge hit. Disney's live-action slate has been largely unaffected, thanks to a combination of approaches. The service used to have a robust line-up of original movies, from a live-action Lady and the Tramp' to 'Hocus Pocus 2.' Some even drifted off the 21st Century Fox assets like 'Home Sweet Home Alone.' But none of these films encroached on any of its brands. If there had been a new live-action adaptation of a beloved Disney animated movie appearing regularly on Disney+, it might have bitten into that business. But they knew, from the beginning, that less was more. And after a while, Disney decided to simply remove most of the movies from Disney+ entirely – you can't find 'The One and Only Ivan,' co-starring and produced by Angelina Jolie or sci-fi adventure 'Crater' or the charming 'Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made' on the platform. These were big-deal titles that Disney touted as being key to their service. They also decided to move some of these projects to theatrical. A 'Moana' series was reconfigured as 'Moana 2,' which was released theatrically last year and made over $1 billion. This summer's live-action 'Lilo & Stitch' was originally planned as a Disney+ original but debuted in theaters and has become the only western movie to make more than $1 billion this year. Walt Disney Animation Studios actually benefited from Disney+. After 'Encanto,' the first post-pandemic Disney animated movie to get a full theatrical release, saw a successful run after debuting on Thanksgiving 2021, Disney decided to throw the movie on Disney+ for Christmas. That's where it became the most-watched film of 2022 with 27.4 billion minutes viewed. Soon after, Disney started referring to it as the company's 'newest franchise.' It inspired a live show at the Hollywood Bowl, entertainment offerings at the Disney Parks and a full-on attraction that is being built at Disney's Animal Kingdom. What's next Walt Disney Studios used to think of projects as 'brand deposits' or 'brand withdrawals.' 'Brand deposits' added to the value of the company's brand, either monetarily or through prestige. These were the projects that embodied Disney – either in their wholesomeness, their entertainment value or their desire to push things forward, technologically or storytelling-wise. 'Brand withdrawals' were projects that actively took away from the Disney brand, either because they didn't fit tonally or didn't deliver on the Disney promise. The brand withdrawal of Disney+ is huge. The company seems to be taking the right steps to course correct – chiefly, to not put out as much product on the streaming service and to re-emphasize the importance of theatrical exhibition. There are far fewer new things on the service. So far this year, there has been a single Disney+ original film and far fewer Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios projects. These numbers will get even smaller, as the streaming service puts its weight behind a handful of projects that hopefully more will enjoy. And just as 'Encanto' found new life on Disney+, the company, if it is smart, will emphasize the platform as a library of all things Disney. This is partially how the product was sold back in 2019. In a way, this might be the easiest way of rehabilitating the company's brands – by reminding people of how good things used to be. Umberto Gonzalez contributed to this story. The post The Disney+ Curse: How the Streaming Service Hurt Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar Brands appeared first on TheWrap.
