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SDCC 2013: Electro Gets Powers From Eels in Amazing Spider-Man 2; Robocop Remake May Not Totally Suck


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Yes, the animal DNA theme continues. And it only took me SIX HOURS waiting in line to find that out. Not kidding. Six hours.

Hit the jump for panel details.

We got the ultra wide triple screen for this one, as moderator Ralph Garman intro’d cast and crew. In a follow-up gag to when Andrew Garfield showed up a couple years ago in a cheap costume, they showed a featurette of him in the new costume swinging across San Diego and c limbing walls to get into Hall H. In character, he acts nervous like last time.

As a video of Emma Stone saying hi from France rolls, the signal is interrupted by Electro singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and in comes Jamie Foxx. “Spidey” stays in character, says he loved Django, to which Foxx says “I’m gonna make you die, boy.” They discuss Any Given Sunday, Spidey says he does what he does because he doesn’t like assholes. Kinda funny, but they’re pushing it a bit long.

“Who’s Andrew…I thought Eduardo Saverin played me!”

Finally, “Spidey” leaves, saying he has to go to the bathroom.

“You don’t have to color inside the lines” – Foxx, on playing a villain. He got the call while his daughter was having a Spider-Man birthday party. Says he knows guys like Max Dillon, who live at home with mom. He gets betrayed by three things – love, his family and his work. Even his mom does not remember his birthday, so when he gets his power, all the anger comes out.

At the beginning of the movie, Spider-Man’s having fun bring Spider-Man, but he learns a lesson or two – a non final version of the trailer shows this. Spidey is cahsing Paul Giamatti, who’s driving a truck through various obstacles and yelling in Russian. Spidey saves Max Dillon, a balding and nerdy Foxx, who’s a low-level Oscorp employee. He can’t believe Spidey calls him by name (reading it off his name tag), and wishes he were famous. While fixing electrical cables in the Oscorp building, a cable misaligns, and he gets shocked, falling through the floor into a big tank of genetically modified electric eels (yes, really, they are pursuing this whole mutant animal DNA thing. We don’t see RHINO-rhino yet, but I assume that happens there too). Then there’s Harry Osborn looking creepy, in an asylum talking to what seems to be his dying dad. He later looks at Spidey and Electro on monitors and says something like “You can’t hide any more.” Electro can levitate, has ghostlike face that’s quite creepy. Harry looks like he’s being set up to be the main villain, though – I’ve heard rumors Green Goblin is the big secret.

Garfield, now out as himself and speaking in his natural accent, says his comments about a gay Spider-Man were a statement of his support for LGBT rights, but in fact it’d be too big a plot change in these movies. Still, he feels Spider-Man should be for everyone.

Dane DeHaan says Harry and Peter are childhood friends, but Harry gets sent away to boarding school and cuts ties with his own life. Now he’s graduated, and coming home.

Foxx says Max Dillon is the first black man in the history of movies to ever have a comb-over. “I can’t think of many brothers who’d let that happen to them.”

Fan says he doesn’t want too many villains like Spider-Man 3. Webb says Electro is the main villain; Giamatti just has a few scenes to set the tone. Electro is god-like, and how do you fight a guy you can’t touch, when your main weapon is a web that conducts electricity? Webb also notes Electro can disappear into an electrical socket, turning his body into energy.

Did Foxx worry that he’d be in the green and yellow costume? He evades the question, says Max doesn’t worry what he has on or what he looks like.
Asked what Spider-Man storyline he’d like to see, Garfield says “I’d like to see him in the Avengers.”

Spidey was preceded by a Robocop remake panel which opened with a video of Sam Jackson in a bad hairpiece, as host of a political talk show, advocating for use of robot law enforcement at home – we cut to a live feed from Tehran, Iran, where ED-209s and humanoid robots patrol the streets augmented by stealth drone robots – like B2 shaped Terminator Hunter-Killers. We cut to government hearings, where Michael Keaton’s character is being asked what a robot would feel if it killed a child. Pressed, he says “nothing.” While Jackson’s Pat Novak is LOUDLY asking why we’re so “robophobic,” a kid in Tehran holding a knife gets blown to bits by an ED 209, as the robots start going nuts and attacking civilians. Novak cuts the live feed.

Panel: Abbie Cornish, Jose Padilha, Joel Kinnaman, Michael Keaton and Sam Jackson. Moderated by Garman.

Jackson calls his character a cross between Rush Limbaugh and Marge Schott.

The trailer shown was a bit more problematic – there’s a bit where Keaton is looking at potential Robocop designs, and one is the classic suit. He shoots it down, says it needs to be more tactical…and black. Murphy is never dead in this, and he always knows he’s Alex Murphy from day one (he’s injured by a car bomb) – but the machine is in control and he’s “along for the ride” – until his humanity starts overriding the machine, of course. Nothing in this trailer as cool as the Tehran stuff in the earlier clip. I will say it looks better than the Robocop sequels – it’s cast well and actually seems to have some timely satire, if they don’t just hammer home “drones drones drones” non-stop. FAAAANS…of JACKSON!!!doing that YELLING THING!!! will be happy.

The reason Robocop has a human right hand is because domestically, there’s a law that says a robot cannot pull a trigger. They circumvent it by putting a man in the machine. It’s meant to be a technicality only – the human parts are a formality rather than a feature.

In response to whether we should fear technology or people, director Padilha gets some applause for basically saying guns don’t kill people, people kill people (not in those exact words, but more or less), and technology’s the same…then qualifies by saying now that you see what people do with guns, it is scary what they will do with technology.