Wonder Con 2019: Day One

March 29, 2019 by Rueben

It’s that time of year again with Wonder Con 2019 getting underway in Anaheim, California. Among the many panels that took place today the following were the TV shows and one big franchise film that were featured:

Dark Phoenix

The latest X-Men franchise film Dark Phoenix will open in theatres on June 7, but at today’s panel the audience got a sneak peek at 17 minutes of the movie.

Thanks to the folks at Syfy Wire, the two key scenes that were screened first found “the X-Men assemble and fly the Blackbird into the cosmos to rescue the crew of a space shuttle damaged by the Phoenix Force. At first all goes well, but Jean (Sophie Turner) accidentally gets left behind to absorb the Phoenix Force into her body.” And in the second sequence, “two teams of mutants — one led by Xavier and one by Magneto (Michael Fassbender) — assemble outside an apartment building on New York’s Central Park, where Jean Grey is holed up inside with the enigmatic alien character (Jessica Chastain).

Those on the panel include writer/director Simon Kinberg, producer Hutch Parker, and cast members Sophie Turner (Jean Grey), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Evan Peters (Quicksilver) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler)

Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger

The panel for the Freeform series Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger, which returns for its second season on April 4, included cast members Olivia Holt (Tandy/Dagger), Aubrey Joseph (Ty/Cloak) and Emma Lahana (Bridget/Mayhem) as well as showrunner Joe Pokaski.

Check out an exclusive clip for the show courtesy of Syfy Wire:

The audience got to see a sneak peek of the entire season premiere that basically focused on how the three characters (Tandy, Ty and Bridget – aka Mayhem) are adjusting to the events of the Season 1 finale.

Legion

A clip from the upcoming third and final season of Legion, which will air on FX in June, was screened for the audience with executive producers Noah Hawley, John Cameron, Lauren Shuler Donner and Jeph Loeb on stage alongside cast members Dan Stevens, Rachel Keller, Aubrey Plaza, Navid Negahban, Jeremie Harris, Amber Midthunder and Lauren Tsai.

The following are excerpts from the folks at CBR.com:

Music plays an important role in the series. Hawley explained that for him, “so much of your experience actually happens through your ears. So much of this show is about setting your state of mind to understand the story.

Loeb shared, “every page of this show is a surprise. And we pride ourselves on making surprises. But Noah, as a filmmaker, is in a different league… what’s sort of remarkable is when you sit and talk with Noah… he’ll explain to you exactly what you’re going to see. It’s like someone trying to explain what a duck looks like if you’ve never seen a duck. And then you finally see it, and you go ‘oh, that’s it.’ This is kind of the end of this journey, and I’m hoping we can convince Noah to come back and do something else with Marvel.”

Discussing how David shifts and changes over the course of the series, Stevens said “We’re all sort of sharing in this wonderful experience, and I think that’s what this has been. An experience. It’s all about feeling the full experience. It’s not about focusing on one narrative or version of David, it’s about all of them fighting and living together.”

When asked about how they decided to end the series, Hawley revealed “The show opened with him at his lowest point, he goes to the hospital and meets a girl and he’s happy. And then he goes off his meds and things get out of hand. So we could either [have David] go back to a happy place, or he can go off the bottom of the map. And we decided that’s where to end the story, otherwise we start the loop again… it’s bittersweet, but a story has no meaning without it’s ending. The old paradigm of television is that major corporations don’t do a mic drop. There’s something special about the… story determining the ending.”

Here are just some of the cool cosplayers photographed at today’s event courtesy of Jeff Gritchen for the Orange County Register/SCNG:

Batman (Frank Miguel) and Superman (Peter Rourlaris)