The 45th Annual San Diego Comic-Con has come once again, and it’s bigger than ever. Hundreds of thousands of fans of comics, movies, television and video games are flocking to Comic-Con for what has become the be all end all center of the nerd universe.
This year at Comic-Con, an estimated 125,000 fans will flood the San Diego Convention Center to get an insider’s look at the latest and greatest in pop culture between July 24th and July 27th.
Here’s a look at what fans can expect to see, hear, do and play at this year’s Comic-Con.
20th Century Fox will introduce an X-Men themed virtual reality interaction at Comic-Con where fans can sit in a replica of Professor X’s chair and virtually track down the mutant Mystique.
The game developer Ubisoft has constructed an enormous obstacle course outside at Comic-Con that ties in with their very popular Assassin’s Creed video game series.
Other interactive offerings will be on hand from Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and TNT.
Sneak peaks at major movie offerings are always a big draw at Comic-Con, and this year will be no exception. CBS is reporting that such anticipated hits as Avengers: Age of Ultron , Mad Max: Fury Road, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, Book of Life, The Boxtrolls, Horns, the sequel to Frank Miller’s Sin City and possibly Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice , will all offer snippets and scene sneak peaks at Comic-Con.
Batman is a big deal this year at Comic-Con, as it’s the caped crusader’s 75th Anniversary, including several panels involving the DVD release of the 1960’s Batman television show.
Marvel is rumored to host a Comic-Con panel this weekend in which they’ll make major announcements concerning their “Phase 3” movies they plan to release through 2019. (Odds are those films will include Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and the third Avengers film.)
Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead will hit Comic-Con hard this year, with each television series being the topic of numerous planned panels. Guillermo del Toro will present his new, creepy FX series, The Strain . SyFy will offer Comic-Con attendees with a look at their sequel to Sharknado , and the BBC will bring their Orphan Black star, Tatiana Masiany to the Con. Other television shows to be featured in panels are The Big Bang Theory, American Horror Story, Son’s of Anarchy, Arrow and The Vampire Diaries.
Game-wise, Nintendo will showcase Super Smash Bros. at Comic-Con. Sega will present Sonic Boom and Alien: Isolation . The latest Lego video game crossover, Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham , will also be unveiled according to ABC.
In addition to all the games, movies and tv shows, Comic-Con attendees will also get a chance to rub elbows with numerous celebrities. Reportedly this year, Daniel Radcliffe, Kevin Smith, Chris Hardwick, Joel McHale, Guillermo del Toro, Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, Benedict Cumberbatch, Peter Jackson… not to mention the casts of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead will all be in attendance.
And those are just some of the ones we know about. As is tradition at Comic-Con, each year there are always reports of surprise appearances and events that no one saw coming.
We can only hope that Comic-Con 2014 has the same sort of surprises!