Comic-Con Handed Out New Superheroes Like Party Favors This Year

San Diego Comic-Con has a way of making Hall H feel like the actual center of the industry for a few days a year, and this stretch delivered on that promise so hard it's a little dizzying to catalog. Between two Marvel casting bombshells, a merger that just got kicked another year down the road, and a Tony-winning musical somehow becoming a movie without becoming a movie, there's a lot to untangle. Let's get into it.

Marvel Restocks Its Bench, All at Once

The biggest, most reflexive gasp of the past few weeks belongs to Ryan Gosling. Marvel confirmed at its Comic-Con panel that he's playing Ghost Rider, reteaming with director Shawn Levy for a 2028 release, and the internet did the thing it does when a genuinely surprising piece of counter-casting lands: it immediately made total sense. Deadline's report confirms what had been rumored, and Vulture is already treating it as a foregone cultural event rather than a casting note.

That wasn't even the only legacy-superhero news of the week. Variety reports that David Jonsson has been cast as T'Challa's son in "Black Panther 3," dated for December 15, 2028, which quietly confirms the franchise is moving forward as a generational saga rather than trying to replace Chadwick Boseman's character with someone standing in the exact same shoes. It's a smart, slightly poignant pivot: instead of recasting a role, Marvel is aging the mythology forward.

And then there's the tentpole to end all tentpoles. Kevin Feige surprised Hall H with new footage from "Avengers: Doomsday," reportedly showing Doctor Doom raising an army of Sentinels to take down the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men all at once, according to Variety's account of the panel. Three separate franchises, one villain, one movie. That's either the most confident piece of blockbuster math in years or the most chaotic, and honestly, both can be true.

The Rest of Hall H Was Just as Weird and Fun

Comic-Con doesn't just belong to Marvel and DC anymore, even if DC's "Lanterns" trailer (described as giving Green Lantern the "True Detective" treatment) suggests DC Studios is still very much playing the prestige-genre-mashup game on HBO. This year's convention also gave John Cena and Jessica Biel a CIA chase plot built around Matchbox toy cars, which Deadline covered with the appropriate mix of bemusement and enthusiasm. Toy-adaptation cinema is apparently not slowing down.

Then there's the small miracle of "Coyote vs. Acme" finally, actually getting shown to an audience. Variety's conversation with director Dave Green and star Lana Condor captures just how strange it is that a film once shelved for a tax write-off is now premiering at Comic-Con to actual fans. "The fight was for a good reason," Condor says, and given the film spent years as a cautionary tale about studio accounting rather than a movie people could watch, that's an understatement.

For a full sense of the scale of it all, Deadline's photo gallery shows just how far Comic-Con has sprawled beyond the convention center itself into a downtown-wide takeover, while Vulture's trailer roundup and panel highlights piece note that Keke Palmer and Lewis Pullman are now the faces of "Spaceballs: The New One," which is a sentence that would have made no sense a decade ago and makes perfect sense now.

Hadestown Figures Out How to Be a Movie Without Stopping Being a Play

Away from the superhero noise, one of the stranger and more interesting experiments of the season is "Hadestown" landing in movie theaters, not as a film adaptation but as a captured, cinema-scaled version of the stage show, original cast and all. Variety's interview with creator Anaïs Mitchell and cast members digs into what it meant to reconvene for something that isn't quite a movie and isn't quite a broadcast of a play either. Variety's own review calls it a "crowd-pleasing" capture of the show's "free-form jamboree vibe," while noting the gods themselves get mostly shoved out of the picture, a detail that's apparently been dividing audiences who wanted more Zeus.

Broadway News talked to director Rachel Chavkin and film director Brett Sullivan about the philosophical question at the center of the whole project: what do you call something that's not exactly theater and not exactly a movie? It's a genuinely new category, and Playbill is already selling it as a gateway drug back to the live show itself, publishing five reasons to catch the stage production after you've seen the filmed version. That's a marketing loop very few properties get to run: see the movie, then go buy a ticket to the thing the movie is a record of.

Broadway Keeps Shuffling Its Deck

Stage news kept moving at its own steady clip while Comic-Con ate the internet's attention. "Wanted" is adding Aurelia Williams and Awa Sal Secka to its cast ahead of previews starting October 15 at the James Earl Jones Theatre, per Broadway News. Meanwhile "Rocky Horror" is doing a full cast changeover, with Jake Shears, Kevin McHale, and Lorna Courtney stepping in for Luke Evans, Andrew Durand, and Stephanie Hsu, a swap TheaterMania describes with the fittingly campy framing that they came from outer space to replace them.

Elsewhere, "Schmigadoon!," this year's triple-crown winner for Best Musical, Book, and Score, is getting its original cast recording released August 21, and Playbill is marking André De Shields' remarkable ongoing run with a quiz, which is as good a signal as any that he's having a moment worth quizzing people about.

The Merger Nobody Can Quite Kill or Finish

Away from the trailers and casting, there's a genuinely consequential piece of business news sitting underneath all of it. Paramount has agreed to postpone its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, with the transaction now on hold until a court rules on the antitrust cases involved or until June 1, 2027, whichever comes first, according to Screen Daily. That's not a collapse, but it's not a green light either. It's an industry-defining deal stuck in legal limbo for potentially another year, which tells you a lot about how fraught consolidation has become even when both sides clearly want to get it done.

Fall Festivals Are Already Being Argued Over

Venice's Alberto Barbera is heading into his 19th edition as artistic director, and Screen Daily's interview finds him fielding pointed questions about the lack of female-directed and studio films in this year's lineup. It's the kind of conversation that happens every year around this time, and the fact that it's a recurring argument doesn't make it any less worth having. Meanwhile on the genre-film side, Hanna Bergholm's "Nightborn" took the top prize at Fantasia, and Screen Daily notes that Blaise became the first French film to win the festival's top animation award, a nice reminder that the genre-fest circuit keeps quietly producing its own history alongside the bigger, louder festivals.