Deadpool & Wolverine breaks record as Kamala surprises at Comic-Con

For the almost 200,000 people who will pass through its gates, the annual San Diego Comic-Con offers the entire alphabet of pop culture, from Captain America to Dragon Ball Z.

But this year the crowd had their eyes on one thing: Deadpool & Wolverine, the Marvel blockbuster which stars Ryan Reynolds and Australian actor Hugh Jackman as the unlikely lads of the superhero world.

Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman have a hit on their hands with Deadpool & Wolverine.Credit: Getty

While Reynolds, Jackman and director Shawn Levy were chatting up thousands of fans at the annual convention, the film itself was surfing the wave of publicity into one of the biggest box office openings in US history and the biggest ever for an R-rated film, pulling close to $US200 million ($A305 million) over the weekend.

The success of Deadpool & Wolverine will be good news at Disney, which owns the Marvel brand, coming off the back of a couple of stumbles, including an expensive TV adaptation of She-Hulk which generated little buzz, and a Captain Marvel sequel, The Marvels, which was a box office failure.

Appearing on stage at Comic-Con in the convention’s biggest auditorium, Hall H, Jackman recalled being at Comic-Con with Reynolds when the first footage of the first Deadpool film was screened, before its 2016 release.

“I was standing just over there, I watched the footage and there was this chant that started up, one more time, one more time,” Jackman said. “I ran backstage, and I found that the stage manager, and I said, play the footage again, if you don’t play the f--king footage again, they are going to tear Hall H to the ground.”

US Vice President Kamala Harris was described as a “super fan” at The Simpsons panel.Credit: AP

Perhaps the biggest surprise was a screening at The Simpsons panel of a video message from US vice-president Kamala Harris, who was introduced by creator Matt Groening as a “super fan” of the show.

“We must move forward, not backward, upward, not downward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom,” Harris said in the clip, quoting a line from a 1996 episode of The Simpsons in which aliens Kang and Kodos impersonate then-President Bill Clinton and presidential candidate Bob Dole on the campaign trail, to rapturous applause.

This year’s Comic-Con - a four-day event which is something of the granddaddy of all Comic-Cons - is a business as usual event, coming off the back of cancellations and closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the writers and actors strikes.

If you needed to take the temperature of the film and TV business, which by any measure are still suffering following the strikes, and struggling to fire up production, Comic-Con would tell you that things are looking good.

San Diego’s Gaslamp district, where the convention is staged, is crammed with fans, and the convention halls are packed. Every corner you turn, you find a passing parade of home-made Batmen, Wonder Women, Spidermen, Catwomen and the weekend’s stars, Deadpools and Wolverines.

Amazon Prime Video dropped a Comic-Con exclusive trailer for the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power that became one of the convention’s biggest announcements.

“Sauron is afoot,” the show’s co-showrunner J.D. Payne told the fans in Hall H. For the uninitiated, Sauron is the villain of The Lord of the Rings story; the Rings of Power is, to some extent, his origin story.

“There’s trouble, there’s danger, there’s death and battle,” Payne said. There’s also a lot more of the iconic future elf-queen Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), the dashing and diplomatic Elrond (Robert Aramayo), the boisterous dwarven prince Durin (Owain Arthur) and, of course, the star of the season, the sinister but charming Sauron (Charlie Vickers).

Another major announcement was that Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan is joining the BBC’s Doctor Who. Coughlan, who plays Penelope Featherington in Bridgerton, will play a character named Joy in the Doctor Who Christmas special.

The character was described by Coughlan as “a determined woman whose life is forever changed when she meets the Doctor” in a sequence filmed secretly in the UK and played to the Hall H crowd. The convention was also treated to a sneak preview of the special, which seems to connect Manchester in 1940, Mount Everest in 1953, the Orient Express in Italy in 1962 and present-day London.

The BBC and Disney also announced a Doctor Who spin-off from Russell T. Davies and Australian screenwriter Pete McTighe titled The War Between The Land and the Sea. The series will explore a clash between humanity and the Sea Devils, a race of ancient, ocean-dwelling creatures who first appeared in Doctor Who in 1972, where they did battle with The Doctor, when he was played by legendary actor Jon Pertwee.

Meanwhile, plans to launch the HBO series The Penguin, which will star actor Colin Farrell as the iconic Batman-universe villain, almost went up in smoke when a fire broke out in the building hosting an “activation” for the series, a re-creation of the seedy criminal hang-out the Iceberg Lounge, which was first seen in the 2022 film The Batman.

During a media preview of the activation there was a fire in the kitchen of a restaurant in the same building, sending plumes of thick smoke into the San Diego sky and forcing the evacuation of media, studio executives, staff and members of the public, who were in a staging area adjacent to the entrance.

The San Diego Police Department confirmed that a three-alarm fire was sounded. In the US, fires are rated at up to five-alarms; a five-alarm fire is the worst-case scenario. The streets surrounding the Penguin event were closed for several hours, until emergency services had vented the building and confirmed it was not in danger of structural collapse.

In total, Comic-Con injects about $US160 million into San Diego’s local economy. The convention runs until Monday, Australian time.