Comic-Con 2016 has come and gone, and as usual, a lot of folks are still talking about the Marvel panel. Marvel Studios regularly brings out the big guns for Comic-Con and this year was no different. They debuted the first footage from Spider-Man: Homecoming, an extended clip and semi-teaser trailer from Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, a new look at Doctor Strange, and even a specially made video for Thor: Ragnarok. However, unlike the Warner Bros. panel where every single piece of footage shown in the room was put online in an official capacity almost immediately, Marvel keeps things entirely under wraps. What’s shown at Comic-Con is only for Comic-Con and will not be made available for public consumption anytime soon.
Every year, folks ask why. Why is it that fans at Comic-Con get to see this stuff and everyone else doesn’t? Well, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 writer/director James Gunn took to Facebook last night to shed a little light on why that footage is not being put online:
“Of course I wanna share with you guys everything, it’s important for me to be able to do that. But here’s the thing, the footage we released at Comic-Con will eventually be seen by the public, but in a more finished form. It’s very early days. We’ve only been finished shooting for a month, we presented an entire huge scene with Yondu and Rocket and Baby Groot and then we also presented some special glimpse for San Diego Comic-Con, a teaser trailer of sorts. The visual effects are not finished.”
Gunn went on to explain that while he doesn’t want the public at large seeing unfinished footage, it’s exciting to offer fans at Comic-Con a brief sneak-peek and the excitement reverberates outside the Comic-Con walls and thus helps get the film on everyone’s radar:
“I am a perfectionist…and the truth is this Comic-Con footage, which we trended last night, Baby Groot trended last night, Guardians trended last night, we did extremely well just by people spreading the word, but it’s not something that I nor Marvel are comfortable with being out there and standing up to repeated viewings because the visual effects just aren’t finished. If I do something, I want to do it 100% correctly. However to sit in the audience one time, with an exciting crowd, and show them an in-progress piece of film, it’s a different story.”
Indeed, I can remember Gunn showing off footage from the first Guardians of the Galaxy at Comic-Con after only a week of shooting and it looked incredible. Marvel makes a point to plan for Comic-Con when creating their schedules, so when they debuted the first footage from Iron Man 3, they could show some seriously impressive footage of the assault on Tony’s house, even if the visual effects weren’t 100% done.
And at the end of the day, we’re all gonna see this footage eventually, be it in the trailers or the movie itself. Marvel just likes to do something special for the fans that invested the time and money to make the trek to Comic-Con, which is a fair trade off. So while you may be frustrated that a small group of people got to see some footage from an upcoming Marvel movie before you, rest easy knowing you’ll see it eventually.
