Yesterday it was all about “Ender’s Game” and “Divergent,” and tomorrow, “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” takes over, but right now, the Hall H stage belongs to “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.” Young adult book-to-film adaptations have a significant presence at San Diego Comic Con this year and we’re about to find out if “Mortal Instruments” will live up to the hype.
Keep refreshing this page to get a sense of what the Shadowhunters have to offer as the panel progresses.
4:42 – And so it begins! Dalton Ross of Entertainment Weekly takes the stage to introduce the panel.
4:45 – We’ve got director Harald Zwart, author Cassandra Clare, and stars Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bower, Kevin Zegers, Godfrey Gao, and Robert Sheehan on stage.
4:46 – Collins says she was a fan of the book before being cast and having Clare give her her approval was the ultimate honor.
4:47 – Zwart compliments the source material and says, “The hardest part was to compress it.” He added that he worked closely with Clare and dubbed the process “smooth sailing.”
4:48 – Clare says, “It was a very sort of group process” because Zwart introduced her to making movies.
4:49 – On Jace’s arrogance – Bower jokes and calls him a “sassy b*tch.” “What stuck out for me about Jace … was this vulnerability about him.” He adds that that’s where his cockiness comes from. Bower says his Jace is “grumpy.”
4:50 – Zegers explains that you can get ahead of yourself and reveal things that shouldn’t be revealed just yet, so he tried to focus on just creating a character without looking too far ahead and making assumptions. About Alec’s sexuality, “That was something I considered, but we were just making a movie.”
4:52 – Clare says that she has a cameo at Magnus Bane’s party.
4:53 – It’s time for a clip from the film! In the scene, Clary tries to get answers out of Jace and Lena Heady deals with some “unwlecomed visitors.”
4:55 – Wow. That sequence was surprisingly impressive. The piece opened with two men barging into Jocelyn Fray’s (Lena Headey) home. Then it cuts to Jace and Clary having a discussion in an alley way. She’s asking him why she draws these symbols and he says something about knowing that she wasn’t Mundane (basically a non-Shadowhunter). That conversation continues to intercut with the attack on Jocelyn. Headey takes quite a beating, but gives her attackers one as well, giving them a number of brutal whacks with a frying pan and crushing one’s head in her refrigerator door. Back to Clary. Her phone rings and it’s her mother who insists she should not come home. In a panic, Clary runs through the street and arrives home to find the place totally ransacked. Before she can really process the situation, a rather vicious looking rottweiler approaches and she goes into battle mode. She smartly locks it in a room, but soon thereafter, it transforms into a squid-like creature of sorts and slithers through the home. Clary hides in a cupboard, grabs something flammable, dribbles the liquid around her, closes the cupboard door, and lights it up, seemingly killing the creature. But just before she can get much relief, it re-solidifies and moves to attack. Just when Clary is seemingly done for, the beast is zapped into a oblivion. Jace has arrived to save the day.
5:03 – That’s all for “Mortal Instruments.” “RoboCop” is up next, so be sure to switch over to that live blog post.