The major studios, and even some of the smaller ones, have been trying to tap into the energy and excitement of Comic-Con for years, and 2012 has been no different. While we can argue about the effectiveness of marketing solely to the geek crowd(the box office results have been mixed), there's no denying that it's the perfect place to get that first raw reaction to whatever summer tentpole is coming down the pike.
The New York Comic-Con is underway and studios are again taking advantage of it. We saw an NYCC exclusive poster for Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Last Stand, and now we've got one-sheets for Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim and John Luessenhop's horror Texas Chainsaw 3D.
Pacific Rim will be Del Toro's first film in six years and is a massive, sci-fi epic about the human fight to defend the earth against an invading army of giant monsters. The poster is a fine piece of old school military propaganda that seems to feature the mechanized Jaeger units that the humans deploy into the battle. Del Toro revealed yesterday that we should keep an eye out for a Pacific Rim graphic novel from screenwriter Travis Beacham that will serve as a prequel. Idris Elba, Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Ron Perlman, Clifton Collins, and Max Martini will star when Pacific Rim opens on July 12th 2013.
And then there's Texas Chainsaw 3D, which desperately needs to add the "Massacre" back into the title. Like right now. A continuation of the classic horror featuring skin mask-wearing Leatherface, the film picks up twenty years later when a woman arrives in Texas to claim the inheritance left by her grandmother, only to find a killer still resides there. Alexandra Daddario, Trey Songz, Scott Eastwood, and other people you don't care about star. Texas Chainsaw 3D opens on January 4th.
