Hall H, Saturday, July 22, 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
The last time I paid money to go to a Star Trek fan event was Destination Star Trek in London in 2021. Most of the Discovery cast were there promoting season 4. The big screens in the halls for talks even had the season 4 trailer airing, prominently announcing the airing date. The first episode was due less than a week after DST and they were really building up the hype.
Two days after the convention, they announced they were pulling Discovery from Netflix and solely airing season 4 on their shitty in-house streaming service, whose launch date in the UK was still ‘tbc’.
Then the mods on r/startrek decided not to enforce spoiler protections for season 4 after it aired in the US, so I got spoiled for the general plot over the course of the next few months. My enthusiasm to watch it dwindled to the extent that, even now that Paramount+ is available here, I still haven’t made it more than a few episodes in.
The moral of the story is: fuck Paramount+.
I remember that disaster, then they had actors going out to try and blame Netflix after they had given out false information at the con.
It might be a pretty sparse panel if the writers and actors are on strike.
It’s okay, they’ll just cancel the panel and remove it before it got a chance to get a big fanbase anyway for some sweet tax credits.
Yeah, I’m interested to see what SDCC in general ends up looking like, dunno what the rules are about doing panels/promotion during the strike.
I don’t think it’s encouraged, but writers have been doing interviews recently despite the strike, so maybe there’s some wiggle room.
Seems like there’s no wiggle room. If SAG-AFTRA goes on strike, actors will not be coming to Comic-Con to panels put on by their respective studios.
Promotion is strictly forbidden. Interviews about the strike or about personal lives are a different matter
It’s interesting the the showrunners have been giving interviews about the episodes all season, then.
I agree. I’m not quite sure how it’s kosher. I can speculate but do not know. For example, maybe some of this stuff was pre-recorded? Just one possible wild guess.
John Hodgman talked about it in his podcast. He cannot promote any of the TV projects he’s worked on because of the strike even though he’d like to, but he is allowed to promote and do stuff for Maximum Fun because it’s an artist co-op which is totally separate from the strike/contract.
I suppose it’s possible that the writers did the interviews prior to the strike, with the interviewers having seen early screeners.
If so, then the interviews will stop after episode… 6 I think it was?
It’s possible that said showrunners are giving interviews in their capacity as producers, not writers.
This is a point of contention between the WGA and studios. See for instance:
https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/showrunners-writers-strike-producing-writing-1235626881/
https://deadline.com/2023/05/writers-strike-disney-hbo-showrunners-letter-other-studios-wga-1235357794/
Hopefully it looks more like a comic convention again without TV and films sucking up all the attention.
I don’t know the strike rules, but with the WGA possibly still being on strike, and SAG possibly going out on strike, during Comic-Con I’m imagining the panels to consist of non-union background actors who never had speaking roles and aren’t in the WGA. Some mild dishing about behind the scenes.
I mean, what else could they promote instead? Those are the only shows still in production or have entire unreleased seasons.
