Walking Dead star Dan Fogler will be attending MCM Comic Con London from 23 May – Sunday, 25 May. Dan joins a star-studded lineup of celebrity guests in attendance at MCM Comic Con next week, including Ratatouille’s Patton Oswalt, Doctor Who’s David Tennant, Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Stephanie Beatriz, the voice behind PlayStation’s Miles Morales, Nadji Jeter, as well as stars from Star Wars: The Bad Batch and Power Rangers.
This year’s MCM London will also include a publishing summit, with an incredible five panels covering the subject of comic book publishing.
MCM Comic Con returns to ExCel London from Friday 23 to Sunday 25 May and will offer fans a chance to attend insightful panels, meet their favourite writers and celebrity guests, participate in writing workshops hosted by prominent authors and more.
The Skulls event usually features new game announcements as well as DLC news. The host will be fan favourite Rahul Kohlio, who is also the voice of Sternguard Veteran Malum Caedo in Warhammer 40K themed boomer shooter, Boltgun.
“There are so many entry points into the Warhammer universe, and mine was through video games,” said Rahul Kohli. “The Warhammer Skulls Festival is something I would be tuning into every year if I wasn’t already hosting it! It’s a pleasure to return for my 3rd year, and I can’t wait to see the reactions to what’s being revealed. It’s gonna be one hell of a show!”
The showcase will also launch a week-long series of offers and freebies, including up to 90% off Warhammer titles; new content, DLCS, and free updates will be available across multiple platforms, including Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and PC.
Anyone wanting to watch the showcase live and keep up to date with all things Warhammer Skulls can follow Warhammer on Twitch at twitch.tv/warhammer and use the hashtag #WarhammerSkulls to be part of the conversation across all social media platforms. After the livestream, head over to warhammer-community.com/skulls to get all the details – including links to sales.
Games Workshop’s other big science-fiction game, The Horus Heresy, is getting a new edition, and the rumours surrounding the game have been rather interesting. The Horus Heresy is a version of the Warhammer 40,000 game set 10,000 years in the past. It’s a grittier setting, using a different set of rules and models that call back to earlier iterations of world’s most popular SF wargame, Warhammer 40,000.
Rumours about the new Horus Heresy game began when details of the new edition were soft-launched via the official Warhammer YouTube Channel. A short skit about new Warhammer games featured a well-timed pun, and directed fans to the website The Horus Hearsay, a website produced by Games Workshop that gently parodied the traditional rumour mill that surrounds product launches like this.
The site clearly intended to slowly reveal the new product in order to build hype. Mixed in were some silly jokes and ‘clearly false’ leaked image, further poking fun at the ecosystem of speculative news that surrounds Warhammer. It seemed likely that a full reveal would appear sometime toward the end of May, with more news likely to tie in with the Dallas Open, a major Warhammer event.
But then we had a surprise twist; the actual game seems to have been leaked. A picture of the The Horus Heresy box set was leaked online, with the images looking grainy but extremely plausible. According to the images available online, the new edition will be subtitled Saturnine. The pictures include images of the keenly anticipated ‘Saturnine Terminators’ and a similarly themed dreadnought.
In a move that embraces the community, The Horus Hearsay website has leaned into this leak, poking fun at the poor quality of the images and continuing as planned. Though it is very likely this was not an official leak, this has been further applauded by Warhammer fans across the globe, for taking the leak with very good humour.
The previous auction raised £20000 for TheGood Law Project and The Triangle Project. This new auction looks to top that, and has some amazing things up for auction.
Items up for sale include a super-rare galley proof of Robert Jordan’s The Eye Of The World, the book that began The Wheel of Time series. They are estimated to be less than 600 copies of this plain galley copy in existence. To put that into perspective, over 90 million copies of the Wheel of Time series have sold worldwide.
Awards season continues with the Arthur C. Clarke Award, created in 1987 to promote science fiction. The shortlist for the 39th Arthur C. Clarke Award Science Fiction Book of the Year has been announced.
This year’s winner will be announced on Wednesday 25th June 2025.
Chair of Judges, Dr Andrew M. Butler, said: “ “Clarke judges always bring passion and expertise to their deliberations and this year’s jury is no exception. Adrian Tchaikovsky might win for the second time, but he’s up against the debuts of Kaliane Bradley and Maud Woolf, as well as Julia Armfield, Ian Green and Sierra Greer’s first adult sf novels. I can’t even begin to guess whose name will be in the envelope.”
The winner will receive a trophy in the form of a commemorative engraved bookend and prize money to the value of £2025.00; a tradition that sees the annual prize money rise incrementally by year from the year 2001 in memory of Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
Uma Thurman picks up a katana once again, this time to defeat Charlize Theron and her team of immortal mercenaries in the trailer for the long-awaited Netflix sequel, The Old Guard 2.
The Old Guard 2 centres on Theron as Andromache of Scythia, aka Andy, as she comes to terms with her newfound mortality while preparing to face a new threat (Thurman).
“She is the first of the immortals,” Theron is warned in the trailer. “She knows your histories, your relationships. I am scared of what she is capable of.”
Thurman and Henry Golding are new to the franchise and join returnees Theron, KiKi Layne, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Matthias Schoenaerts and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who all reprise their roles from the 2020 film.
Where Gina Prince-Blythewood directed the first film, Victoria Mahoney directs The Old Guard 2 from a script by Greg Rucka and Sarah L. Walker. The franchise is based on the graphic novel series from Rucka, who also worked on the script for the first movie, and illustrator Leandro Fernandez.
“There’s something for everyone in this movie,” Theron said in a statement about the sequel. “Fans who loved the first film, fans who love the original graphic novels — and brand-new fans who are looking for insane action, grounded and relatable characters, gorgeous locations and a global cast of superstars.”
Watch the trailer for The Old Guard 2 below. The film releases to Netflix on July 2nd.
The MCM Scholarship scheme is designed to give young creatives a better chance of a future career in the creative arts that are adjacent to MCM Comic Con.
Those selected will get free entry to MCM Comic Con London this May, as well as a three-night stay in a hotel and a cash prize of £500. MCM also builds a bespoke itinerary to connect these people to the industry.
The selected scholars include author Muminah Koleoso, up-and-coming illustrator Sudipta Patra and video game concept artist Ash Norman.
All visitors to MCM Comic Con will be able to access fun workshops, including special effects makeup workshops with professional SFX artist BBSFX, one-on-one voice acting coaching with voice actors JD Kelly and Trine Jensen, an interactive young adult fiction writing workshop with the author of the Mina and the Undead Trilogy, Amy McCaw amongst others. Tickets can be purchased HERE.
Acclaimed Brit Indie director Howard J. Ford (The Dead 1 and 2, Never Let Go, Darkgame) has just wrapped on his latest film Bone Keeper, a monstrous tale of discovery and survival, which centres on six friends who enter a remote cave system to investigate the legend of the ‘Bone Keeper’, only to find themselves being hunted by a mysterious creature that may have inhabited the cave for thousands of years. Will they uncover the truth, escape the creature, or become the next missing souls?
Bone Keeper, which Ford has produced through his company Latitude Films, stars John Rhys-Davies (The Lord of the Rings, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Sarah Alexandra Marks, Louis James, Tiffany Hannam-Daniels, Sophia Eleni, Danny Rahim, Tyler Winchcombe and Sarah T. Cohen. The film’s VFX supervisor is Giordano Aita.
International sales agency REInvent is handling international sales and plans to reveal first footage at the Cannes Film Festival.
Ford said, “I’ve always been intrigued with caves and caverns and imagined if something lurked down there in the depths, so I am very excited to be making a creature-feature and reuniting with the REinvent team and not least working with the legendary Mr. John Rhys-Davies, who has been an absolute blast.”
Expect more on this project following the Cannes reveal.
Leslie Grace (In the Heights, the tragically fated Batgirl) is going to be spending time inside a giant sperm whale in Propel, a survival thriller being billed as Gravity meets 127 Hours under water.
The feature follows Kate Acosta, a commercial diver who is swallowed by a giant sperm whale during a routine commercial dive, Captain Ahab-style. Trapped in a living prison and gasping for air, Kate must confront both real-life monsters of the deep and her inner demons as a desperate fight for survival and salvation unfolds.
Felipe Vargas (Rosario) is directing from a script by Jeremy Marwick, itself inspired by real events. Filming is expected to begin this year. Javier Chapa and Phillip Braun of Mucho Mas Media are set to produce with Derrick Eppich for Empirical Evidence.
Described as a “pulse-pounding elemental thriller that will leave you breathless” and a “white-knuckle thriller that explores family, resilience and rebirth,” Altitude will introduce the project to buyers in Cannes in the next week.
Since her film debut in the musical In the Heights, Leslie Grace has also starred in the drama film In the Summers and the Western thriller The Thicket. She is also the recipient of three Latin Grammy award nominations.
Dropstar Meghann Fahy has been tapped to lead the supernatural thriller Banquet from The Platform director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia. The upcoming film is based on an original screenplay from Fingernails writer Sam Steiner, according to Deadline.
Fahy will play “Jenny Cochrane, a woman whose perfect life is shattered by the return of her estranged son, which reawakens a terrifying secret buried in her bloodline.” That’s all we know for now.
Meghann Fahy is next due to appear in Netflix’s dark comedy Sirens also starring Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Parts 1 & 2 filmmaker David Yates will executive produce under his banner Wychwood Media alongside Florian Zeller (The Father) and Federica Sainte-Rose for Blue Morning Pictures.
Gaztelu-Urrutia is best known for directing The Platform and The Platform 2. The first film is set in a large, industrial tower named the “Vertical Self-Management Centre.” Every month, prisoners of the centre switch between the tower’s many floors and are fed by a vertically moving platform with food on it. The platform is initially filled with lots of food, and gradually lowers through the tower’s levels, stopping for a short amount of time on each floor. Since the residents of each floor will eat as much food as they can, those on the lower floors are often left to starve, leading to conflict.
XYZ Films is financing and will launch international sales for Banquet this month, and filming is set to begin in October in the UK, so stay tuned for updates as we hear them.
