WonderCon: Warner Brothers Presents ‘Edge of Tomorrow,’ ‘Into the Storm,’ and ‘Godzilla’ (2014)

Warner Brothers started things off with Bill Paxton as the lone panelist for Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow, based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need Is Kill. Set for release onJune 6, Tom Cruise plays Lt. Col. William “Bill” Cage, a soldier fighting against an alien race. The story appears similar to Groundhog Day because Cage is caught in a time loop and relives the same day, bringing with him increasing knowledge on how to defeat the aliens.

Paxton had the crowd in the palm of his hand by shouting out classic lines from his roles in films, such as Aliens (“Game over, man!”) to Weird Science (“How ’bout…a nice greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ashtray?”). Aside from the expected pleasantries about his cast members and working on Edge, he mentioned how he was content being a supporting character in big films and that he was developing Joe R. Lansdale‘s The Bottoms as a project he would direct.

Directed by Steven Quale, Into the Storm is a disaster film featuring tornadoes tearing up some fictitious town. The CGI looked impressive for its realism, but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of a story or characters in the material. The ladies who stepped to the audience microphone didn’t seem to mind since they got to ask a question of the film’s lead and their favorite dwarf from Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, Richard Armitage.

Director Gareth Edwards spoke about the film with the summer’s biggest star, Godzilla. He discussed the external and internal pressures of bringing the iconic character of to the screen 60 years after its debut and creating a film that both honored the legacy but was also unique. He obviously reveres Ishiro Honda‘s film and stated his surprise by the statement from a South Korean man, who referred to the 1998 version as the “original film.”

In addition to the trailer, Edwards presented a six-minute sequence that slightly expanded on what the film is about. It’s not solely humans dealing with the titular creature, which is the story of the first film and what I thought this film was about from the marketing I had seen. Instead, there is another monster, known as a Muto, a winged creature with insect-like stick legs in front. We see a clear shot of the Muto at an airport and then the clearest reveal yet of Godzilla’s face. Not sure how I feel about the look of Godzilla’s face, but the crowd went so wild their cheers drowned out the monster’s familiar roar.