Comic-Con: Kick-Ass 2, Riddick and Vin Diesel's Marvel news Jul 20th 2013, 07:23
At Universal's panel, returning hero Vin Diesel previewed footage from Riddick, dropped a Marvel bombshell and revealed his Dungeons and Dragons origins. Plus: Kick-Ass 2 footage
Marvel fans weren't necessarily expecting a surprise announcement at Comic-Con on Friday but they got it anyway. Vin Diesel dropped a bombshell on attendees in the hangar-like Hall H during a Universal panel when he fuelled further casting rumours by declaring, "There's going to be very big news coming out at the end of this month."
Kerpow! Diesel's reply to a last-gasp question by an audience member at the very end of the Riddick panel drew a smattering of gasps, sharp intakes of breath and a more than a little ripple of applause. The star's immediate reaction to the question about whether he would appear in a Marvel movie was to squirm a bit and admit he couldn't say anything. Then he grinned and dropped the line about the big news. The Marvel panel on Saturday may have answers.
The star was far more open about Riddick, in which he reprises his role as the predator with the bizarre eyes who this time is hunted by a mercenary on a hostile planet populated by even more hostile aliens.
Writer-director David Twohy collaborated with Diesel on the 2000 series original Pitch Black and its 2004 follow-up The Chronicles of Riddick and couldn't resist the lure of nostalgia. "Last time I was in Comic-Con was 13 years ago," he told a hushed Hall H in the San Diego Convention Centre. "I came down with a little-known movie called Pitch Black and a little-known actor called Vin Diesel. Nobody knew who we were but it turned out alright."
Diesel revealed that his love of role-playing games had been a big influence on his career. "Dungeons & Dragons was a training ground for the imagination," he said to much happy rattling of cardboard guns from the gathered masses. "We would act out these characters and it didn't take more than a couple of hours before you really believed you were these characters."
So now we know. Diesel considered the character elements of his two most famous on-screen personas. "Dom [Toretto, from Fast & Furious] is a character who has a certain level of anger in him…. What's inside Riddick is so scary. Now I have kids, when I watch the Riddick character there's a part of me that feels guilty for having such a darkness in that character. I look at what he does and I think 'That wasn't cool, he shouldn't have killed that guy.'"
One gets the sense that come September (it opens on the 4th in the UK and 6th in the US) audiences – be they parents or not – will want nothing more than for Riddick to thrust his terrifying weapons into bad guys and even badder extra-terrestrials. Riddick promises much of both.
The first part of Universal's panel was devoted to Kick-Ass 2, the sequel to the surprise hit from 2010. A ripped Aaron Taylor-Johnson took to the stage with Christopher Mintz-Plasse and director Jeff Wadlow. In the new story, Mintz-Plasse's Red Mist character is hell-bent on revenge after the titular hero had the nerve to eliminate his dad in the first movie.
The panel showed clips and gave the crowd what it wanted – heaps of sequences of Hit-Girl devastating her opponents. Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass train together and muster an army that will eventually take on an evil battalion gathered by Red Mist. Wadlow showed a green band trailer and promised a red band version would appear online later in the day.
Hit-Girl actress Chloe Grace Moretz was filming in Boston but spoke via satellite link-up. "I love to play characters who are super opposite to me," the 16-year-old explained. "That's why when I read the script for Carrie [the reboot that opens in the US on 18 October] I loved the character. When I read the new script for Kick-Ass 2 I needed [to see certain depths in] Mindy [Hit-Girl's alter ego] – you need to see who she is and who she wants to be.
"There's a strong Cock Robin kind of girl but there's something behind all the layers. There's a little girl in there who has lost her dad… she's completely lost who she is."
Kick-Ass 2 opens in the UK on 14 August and in the US on 16 August.
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