Comic-Con finally returns to San Diego this week, where new Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones TV series will compete before tens of thousands of cosplaying geeks and nerds at the world’s most famous pop culture gathering.
Disney and its Marvel superheroes will also preview their upcoming films and shows to adoring fans at the sprawling convention, which has not taken place in full for three years due to the pandemic.
“I think it’ll look like Comic-Con from 2019,” said the event’s communications chief David Glanzer, even if guests—whether dressed as hobbits, dragons or princesses—will be required to wear face masks.
In addition to 135,000 screaming fans, the comic book, science fiction, and fantasy extravaganza draw Hollywood’s biggest studios and their A-list stars to show off upcoming titles—kicking off this year with Paramount’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
Marking the first time the world’s most popular role-playing game has received a mega-budget silver-screen adaptation, the movie out next March stars Chris Pine, Hugh Grant, and former Bridgerton heartthrob Rege-Jean Page.
But the week’s headlines are set to be dominated by two huge fantasy series coming to television screens soon: Amazon Prime’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and HBO’s House of the Dragon.
The Rings of Power is Amazon’s enormously ambitious saga taking place in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, set long before the events of Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning film trilogy.
The series—playing out across five seasons, the first of which launches September 2—is reported to have cost Amazon well over $1 billion, and is said to be a personal obsession of founder Jeff Bezos.