Hugh Jackman, Chris Hemsworth among A-listers at Comic-Con

Australian stars Hugh Jackman, Yvonne Strahovski and Chris Hemsworth are among the Hollywood A-listers appearing at the annual San Diego Comic-Con this weekend.

They will be joined by actors Ryan Reynolds, Keegan-Michael Key, Brian Tyree Henry, Will Ferrell, Christian Slater, Lupita Nyong’o and others, including Alien: Romulus director Fede Alvarez, Star Trek showrunner Alex Kurtzman and Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies.

Teacup star Yvonne Strahovski at San Diego Comic-Con.

Founded in 1970 as an actual comic book convention, Comic-Con is where Hollywood’s studios bring out their big guns to promote upcoming films and television series.

Jackman and Reynolds are at Comic-Con promoting Deadpool & Wolverine, Nyong’o is coming to sell the upcoming Wild Robot to fans, and Yvonne Strahovski is the star of a new horror series, from Australian producer James Wan, titled Teacup. (Despite the benign title, it promises to frighten you out of your wits.)

“This is a massive congregation of the fan base,” Strahovski told this masthead. “The people who live for this kind of content ... the kind of people who come to this place to celebrate these kinds of art forms.”

The 41-year-old actress is a Comic-Con veteran, having attended in previous years to help promote other projects, including her breakthrough roles in the US dramas Chuck, Dexter and 24: Live Another Day.

Fans on the convention centre floor at 2024 San Diego Comic-Con.

Almost 200,000 people will push through the turnstiles over the four-day weekend, and tens of thousands more will come to San Diego’s Gaslamp district, where studios, networks and production companies have taken over restaurants, bars and exhibition spaces.

For most people, the focal point of Comic-Con is the convention floor, where comic book artists, sellers and resellers share a huge retail space with pop culture retailers like Funko, Hasbro and LEGO, and comic book publishers like DC and Marvel.

There are also a ton of off-site “activations” - either exhibitions or interactive experiences, ranging from a journey into the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which includes original costumes and props from the iconic film franchise, to The Lodge, a Paramount-designed site which taps into that studio’s assets, particularly Star Trek.

Hall H is the largest space at the convention, with 6500 seats. And it is where all the big-ticket Comic-Con action takes place.

Chris Hemsworth participates in the Paramount Animation Panel at Comic-Con.Credit: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

The Deadpool & Wolverine panel is an early hot ticket. Similarly, tickets to the Hall H panels for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Doctor Who and the highly anticipated Batman-universe set series, The Penguin, are among the most in-demand panels with fans.

The Hall H Transformers One panel will feature three of the film’s stars - Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry and Keegan-Michael Key. The film, directed by Josh Cooley, is an origin story film for the Transformers franchise charting the emergence of Optimus Prime on Cybertron, the home planet of the Transformers.

The Hall H The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power panel will feature show runners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay. Set in the “Second Age” of Middle-earth, the second season of Rings of Power will launch on Amazon’s Prime Video next month.

Hall H will also be where Warner Bros unveils The Penguin, its highly anticipated Batman villain drama. The series stars Colin Farrell as the iconic villain, first brought to the screen in the 1960s by actor Burgess Meredith.

The Planet of the Apes exhibition at Comic-Con.

Alien: Romulus director Fede Alvarez will give fans the first look at footage from the new chapter of the franchise, and later in the weekend Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige will take to the stage in Hall H to unveil future film and TV plans for Marvel’s “cinematic universe”.

As the convention kicked off, the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA called a strike against major video game publishers. The union and the game publishers have been negotiating for more than a year, but talks have stalled on the thorny topic of the use of artificial intelligence in games.

Despite the strike, union members will be free to attend Comic-Con and appear on panels for struck video game publishers. The union said the convention was considered exempt from strike action and video game performers were free to “go and have fun”.

That Comic-Con still stands after all these years is a reflection of the staying power of pop culture, particularly in film and television.

San Diego police officers on duty as night one of this year’s Comic-Con gets underway.

This year is also something of a back-to-business Comic-Con, after challenges such as the COVID pandemic, which led to cancellations and kept crowds away, and last year’s writers’ and actors’ strike, which left organisers scrambling to fill the convention’s panels.

In total, Comic-Con injects around $US160 million ($244.5 million) into San Diego’s local economy. The convention will run until Monday, Australian time.

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