It didn’t take long for the first surprise of the Con! Just after the MAX PAYNE and THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL panels wrapped, the stage went empty until a special guest walked in off the side of the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, HUGH JACKMAN.”
I’ve seen a lot of craziness in Hall H in my time but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before. Bedlam. Absolute bedlam. The crowd just went completely insane. Grown women weeping. Men rushing the stage. It took a good five minutes for everyone to calm down before Hugh could even speak. Finally Hugh said he just got off a flight from Australia but that there was no way he was missing Comic-Con this year. He said he has “waited years to bring Wolverine” to Comic-Con after missing the boat on X-MEN 2 and 3. Hugh said he wanted to pay homage to the creator of Wolverine, Len Wein, who was in the audience. It was at this point Hugh decided he wanted to come down into the Hall H crowd.
Security wasn’t prepared and Hugh was mobbed prompting him to later admit that “maybe that wasn’t such a great idea.” But Hugh was able to come down and shake Len’s hand and high-five a few people in the audience. Once back on stage Hugh apologized for not having a full panel but said they literally just wrapped filming and that he wanted to show off a brief something. He said that you can expect X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE to be three things: “big, action-packed and BAD-ASS.” Oh and you can expect lots of berserker rage.
With that Hugh introduced the clip, a sort of Con trailer.
It starts off with Logan and Victor Creed in a POW camp. Enter a young William Stryker (Danny Huston) who asks how it was that they were both set to be killed by firing squad yet they’re both still alive. “How’d that feel?,” he asks. “It tickled,” says Logan.
From there we see Stryker trying to convince Logan to enter the Weapon X project (though that name is never mentioned). He agrees and we see some shots that look directly from the classic “Weapon X” comics. Logan under water, getting injections and finally bursting out of the tank and running around naked slashing people.
From there we see a lot of quick cuts including a young Logan with his bone claws, Wolvie smooching Silver Fox and a helicopter chasing Wolverine on a motorcycle. As you might expect, Wolvie is able to jump his bike and LAND on the heilcopter. All mixed in are tons of cameos including Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, Gambit, Blob and more. And yes, Gambit using his staff and throwing cards looked awesome (the crowd went nuts).
Finally at the very end we see Creed (now as Sabretooth) say to Wolverine, “How are you gonna kill me?”
“I’m gonna cut your goddamn head off.” BAM. END.
It’s still early to call it the best of the Con, but I can’t imagine anything approaching the fever pitch in Hall H when Jackman came out and screened the footage. Unfortunately I don’t see an official version coming online soon but man was it good!
Hey, maybe the guys at Fox read C’mon Hollywood!…