While clips and headlines exploded from Comic-Con 2026 this weekend about the upcoming “Avengers: Doomsday,” the casting of David Jonsson in Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther III,” and the fact that Ryan Gosling is playing “Ghost Rider” for Shawn Levy, we found the stories at this year’s event that deserve more attention.
As San Diego Comic-Con attendees walked through the Sails Pavilion on the second floor of the convention center, about 20 cosplayers dressed as Indiana Jones, a Henry Jones senior, a Marion, a handful of Short Rounds, and someone dressed as the boulder in the first scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” surrounded a guy in a suit who turned out to be the real-life John Rhys-Davis, who played Indy’s friend Salleh in four films. San Diego Comic-Con is where fans get to be the characters they love and interact with the creators and the real-life stars who played them.
And they have the fun of learning that it goes both ways. At the panel of costume designers for the Percy Jackson show, lead designer Catherine Adair told the audience that when it came to a wedding dress that was described in detail by author Rick Riordan in book two of the series, they checked out the online fan art to see how the audience envisioned it. I asked composer Michael Dean Parsons how it felt to know the “Bridgerton” theme he composed with Kris Bowers was so popular at weddings, he admitted he checks out YouTube to see the way people are incorporating it into their most significant moments. And on the panel for collectors of the cherished physical media collectibles SteelBooks, Devon Downs of Alliance Entertainment presented the forthcoming “Project Hail Mary” 4K UHD edition, telling the audience that the company likes to find new artists for the cover and interior designs through Instagram. And the entire SteelBooks panel loves to check online for “shelfies,” displays of fan collections.
I especially enjoy the panels with people we don’t usually get to hear from, but who make creative contributions that contribute immeasurably to cinematic storytelling. The twelfth annual panel of composers who write for superhero movies is one of my favorites and I had a chance to talk with each of them afterward. The panel was moderated by Oscar-winner Michael Giacchino (“Up,” “The Incredibles,” “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”), with Kris Bowers and Michael Dean Parsons (“Spider-Noir” and “Bridgerton”), Mick Giacchino (“VisionQuest”), and Claudia Sarne (“Supergirl”). Parsons talked about the “bottle episode” 6 of “Spider-Noir,” where his assignment was to make it “really weird,” so they “played every instrument that you could play wrong.” For “Spider-Noir,” the music had to combine classic noir, sci-fi, and superhero, conveying a strong theme and a character arc. His co-composer, Kris Bowers said they felt like they were in the writers’ room. They had a funny discussion about name track titles, some referring to what is actually happening in the scene, some more random, some a reference to how much trouble they had getting it finished. But all agreed that nothing is more fun than “painting with sound.”
Michael Giacchino shared the “VisionQuest” theme; the rest of the world will not hear it until the show premieres on October 14 and told us Ultron (James Spader) will be getting a new theme. I asked him about using voices in his composition for the first time. “In some of the more emotional moments, I had the choir double what the strings were doing, but with humming. The texture can almost sound like one of those old Disney films. It just gave a really nice kind of warmth to the strings and filled out the sound a little bit. But there are also times where vocals are leading with melodies, and there is one character who has a theme that’s more based around vocals at times and then it transitions into the orchestra.” Bowers, last year’s Middleburg Film Festival Composer Award-winner, said, “When you work on a project, it creates this filter. Then you see the whole world through that filter, and you hear something and say, ‘Oh, that’ll be perfect for this thing.’” Sarne said, “Music imprints just as much as visual does. And it’s such a shorthand. It does what words can’t. You’re immediately brought into the world of the characters, and that to me is the magic of what we do.”
A panel of Black costume designers specializing in action and superhero movies provided a lot of insights into the challenges of making supersuits that are like “mini-Ferraris,” inserting stretch panels, hidden zippers, cooling or warming layers, and pick points (to attach to harnesses and pullies). Gersha Phillips (“Captain America”), Trayce Gigi Field (“Spider-Noir”), Charlese Antoinette (“Children of Blood and Bone”), Antoinette Messam (“The Bluff”), Dominique Dawson (“HIM”), Tiffany Hasbourne (“Shadow Force”), and Jennifer Bryan (“The Acolyte”) have to dress stunt performers who are often bigger and more muscular and with different races or skin tones from the actors they are portraying to make them look indistinguishable while keeping them safe with padding and inflammable fabrics.
The question that provoked the most laughter from the panelists was, “How do they go to the bathroom?” That is an important issue not just for the comfort of the actors but for the production as a whole, so they don’t hold up shooting for an hour “while three people help the actor pee.”
Messam talked about setting up a full costume production operation in a parking lot with dyers, agers (pro tip: put the clothes in the dryer with cut up car mats to make them look worn), welding, with one set of costumes that needed to be drenched with water and another that they had to keep dry. Field said that when she signed on to do “Spider-Noir,” she was told it was just going to be black and white. Two weeks into it, they told her it was going to be in color, too. They had to keep special lenses in the costume department because over 1000 items had to be “camera-tested” to see if they would work in both formats. “Anything with a lot of contrast or reflective translated well.” All of the panelists were department heads, sometimes supervising 100 people with different specialties. Antoinette had a cobbler, a jeweler, sewers, a group working with the background performers, fitters for men, fitters for women, and beaders. “It was like running my own fashion brand.”
Writer/director Brad Bird held the cavernous Hall H rapt with a discussion of his films, with stories about “The Iron Giant” (“The story of a gun with a soul who didn’t want to be a gun”),“The Incredibles” (completely changing the villain to one created for a brief opening scene), writing and re-writing Ego’s speech at the end of “Ratatouille” (“You’re supposed to get faster and louder near the end but we made it slower and quieter”). And he told us about his first live action film be “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” being terrified as the “one of one” fearless Tom Cruise was hanging off a skyscraper. “He’s the producer; you can’t tell him no.” He showed us the first seven minutes of his new film for Netflix, “Ray Gunn,” a “Buck Rogers meets ‘The Maltese Falcon’”) detective story he had been developing for 30 years. It features the voices of Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Waits. His other dream project is a series about the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.
Of course there were many questions throughout Comic-Con about AI. One of the booths on the exhibition floor had a sign assuring us that there was no use of AI in creating their products. When the subject came up on the composers panel, Michael Giacchino said, “I don’t think anyone wants to see a laptop doing a concert.”
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