All the Best, Weirdest, and Most Exciting Trailers from Comic-Con 2019

Comic-Con season is always a fun time for all of us nerds out here, especially if you're one of those people who loves to watch trailers over and over again to hype yourself up for what's coming soon. While this year didn't bring anything new from Marvel besides a couple of whopping announcements (Thor 4!! Mahershala Ali is Blade!! Kumail Nanjiani is in Eternals!!) it left a lot of room for everything else. From the Skeksis to the Terminators to the great black expanse of space, San Diego Comic-Con 2019 boldly went to all the places we can't wait to follow later this year, and we picked out the wildest and best trailers from the weekend for you to enjoy. 

When Netflix announced it was doing a Dark Crystal sequel, the nostalgia fatigue hit an all-time high. The Dark Crystal is something so special, so singular and strange, how could anyone hope to recreate it now that visual effects tech is so far advanced? But, from what we can see in this first look at Age of Resistance, from co-creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews (who also co-wrote the show with Javier Grillo-Marxuach), this series hews much closer to the original, leaning heavily on the puppetry and practical sets and effects that made the first movie so good. 

The future of the Terminator franchise has looked extra bleak in recent years, but it seems like Terminator: Dark Fate, which will bring back both Arnie and Linda Hamilton as well as introduce a superpowered Mackenzie Davis into the mix, returns the series to its gritty, gut-punchy roots. As James Cameron says in this featurette, Dark Fate comes, "tonally," after T2, sooooo it's OK if we choose to conveniently forget that Salvation and (cringe) Genisys ever happened. 
 

Again, sequel fatigue, and again, as soon as the trailer hits, I'm 100% onboard. Maverick is back!! He's in the plane!! He's doing all kinds of crazy shit!! Where can I buy a million tickets please????

The robots have escaped Westworld, and those whose minds haven't been uploaded into the Cloud or whatever face a new challenge: Reality World. And… Naziworld? World War II World? Cool! All the bots not still trapped in theme park hell have been set loose on the real world of the far future, and if the humans catch them, they'll be decommissioned before they can say "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." Good thing Dolores has Aaron Paul on her side! Though, this is Westworld, so it's very difficult to say whose side anyone is really on.

I was really iffy on this Watchmen series after that first V for Vendetta-esque teaser dropped, but the first full trailer looks MILES better. This whole time, it's been described as a kind of reshuffling of the Watchmen mythos instead of a straight adaptation of the graphic novel, but no one was really sure what that actually meant until Comic-Con. In this trailer, it looks like the story picks up after the events of Watchmen as we know it left off -- i.e., Adrian Veidt is dead and the plucky band of nihilistic superheroes is no more, leaving plenty of room for a new crop of vigilantes to take their place, as well as including plenty of nods to the original source material. Raining squids?? You love to see it.
 

Probably the most anticipated fantasy TV series of the year, His Dark Materials, the first season of which adapts the events of Philip Pullman's legendary The Golden Compass, hits this winter, and every second of footage we've seen of it looks fantastic. (The movie also looked fantastic, so we're trying not to get TOO excited, but come on.) The new Comic-Con trailer showcases the gilded, steampunk-inspired aesthetic (obsessed with Mrs. Coulter's 3-D map of the North Pole), and we finally get a few glimpses of the characters' daemons, as well as the huge armored polar bear Iorek Byrnisson. The casting of Logan's Dafne Keen is the closest thing to perfect we've ever seen. 

With Star Trek: Discovery, the world of Trek ventured into the past, telling the story of the Klingon war and the events that transpired afterwards. With Picard, the franchise is going forward again, picking up with former Captain Jean-Luc Picard as he is called into service once again to protect humanity from an unknown menace. This trailer is a genuine adrenaline rush for anyone for whom Star Trek was and is a big part of their lives. Seeing Patrick Stewart don that Starfleet pin once more stirs something inside of you. The Borg are back! (Scary!) The return of Seven of Nine! (Exciting!) Picard has a nice dog! (Cute!) Data, chopped into bits and kept prisoner in a drawer! (Troubling!) Look at that happy glint in his eye when Stewart says "Engage!" We genuinely can't wait to see this. 

CBS All Access also debuted a teaser for Short Treks, a series of six short episodes that each tell contained stories, one of which will lead into their new Picard series.
 

Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer told a grueling tale of class war enacted onboard a futuristic train girdling a post-apocalyptic Earth frozen solid in a global winter. The new series from TBS will retell the events of the original movie, this time starring Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connelly as two people from opposite ends of society's last stand, one of whom is determined to break down the barriers between the filthy rich and the terribly poor, possibly stopping humanity's last hope in its tracks. There's a lot in here from the movie too, including that stomach-churning scene where someone gets their arm frozen solid and chopped off. Let's hope the show doesn't skimp on those delicious cockroach-jello protein bars either. 
 

I still can't quite believe Henry Cavill is playing Geralt of Rivia, a.k.a. the Witcher, in a Netflix series based on the Polish fantasy books that launched a hugely popular franchise of video games. The Witcher will take its cues from the original novels, which follow white-haired Geralt as he fights to bring balance to a world where chaos becomes a dangerous form of magic in the wrong hands. My favorite part of this is how you can tell who the main characters are because their eyes are weird colors like yellow or purple instead of pedestrian ones like brown and green. 
 

Amazon Prime's Carnival Row might secretly be the most deranged thing to happen this year. A weird urban fantasy starring Orlando Bloom playing a rejected extra from Peaky Blinders and Cara Delevigne playing a tall Irish fairy set inside a town where humans and magical creatures exist side by side??? Excuse me?? David Ayer who??? Comic-Con released two "prologue" teasers that still don't explain anything that's going on, but you bet I'm going to watch this as soon as it drops. This is also the first fantasy series for grownups Prime has released, so we'll see how well it bodes for their huge upcoming Lord of the Rings project. 
 

Everyone who had followed the extremely underrated The Expanse on Syfy, which told an interconnected story of the lives and political turmoil of humans living in a variety of interstellar habitats, from giant starships to asteroid belts to the surface of Mars, were crushed when the network announced that the show would be cancelled after its third season. Fortunately, it was picked back up by Amazon Prime, and will continue its tale of intrigue, deception, and the solar system's delicate balance, in a fourth season, debuting this December. Prime also dropped a look at an extended scene from the new season. 
 

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