Director Brad Bird has managed to keep a pretty tight lid on the details of his upcoming film Tomorrowland. It is from Disney, so we know that there will be a connection to the Disney theme parks and indeed there have been some reports of filming there. We know that the cast includes George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson and Judy Greer, but we didn’t have much of a clue as to what kind of characters they were playing.
Earlier today at New York Comic Con, Bird pulled the curtain back a little bit on the film with the help of screenwriter Damon Lindelof and cast members Laurie, Clooney, Robertson and Raffey Cassidy.
1. Brad Bird only wants you to know exactly what he wants you to know about the film.
Production on this film has been fairly shrouded in secrecy on purpose, with Bird stating that he wanted to keep its secrets secret until audiences are seeing it in theaters next summer. Laurie joked that when he read the full script for the project, it was under the watchful gaze of the “beady eye of an armed man.”
In the meantime, though, Bird would like you to see this first teaser trailer for the film, which was premiered during the panel.
However, there was another sequence of from the film that he apparently doesn’t want to see if you weren’t at the panel as they have not released that yet. In it, Robertson’s character of Casey has come to the home of George Clooney’s character Frank Walker seeking answers to her questions about the mysterious pin (see #2 below) she has come into possession of. Frank tells her to go away, but after a while Casey manages to trick her way into the house, much to Frank’s annoyance. Before they can discuss things further, the house is invaded by identical looking goons. As Frank’s home security system, an imaginative collection of lasers and shifting gravity fields, it is revealed that the goons are robots. Frank offers no answer as to who may have sent them and he and Casey finally make their escape via a rocket escape pod concealed in the bathtub. (Really!)
2. The pin is the MacGuffin that drives the film’s plot.
As you can see from the teaser trailer, the Tomorrowland pin is the object that draws Casey into the bigger story of the film. But beyond that, no additional details were given.
3. No one is saying anything about Athena, so her character must be really important.
It turns out, though, that Frank is not the character who got the pin into Casey’s possession. But, as Lindelhof revealed, it was Raffey Cassidy’s Athena. And who is Athena? No one’s talking. Cassidy does reveal that her character knows karate and that although she was the one who started Casey on her journey, she may not totally be a good guy.
4. George Clooney had to explain to his new bride why they were honeymooning at New York Comic Con.
Clooney has a great sense of humor about himself, appearing on stage mid-panel after Laurie made some tongue-in-cheek disparaging comments about the actor’s drinking and shouting on set. Whether joking about how he’s finally happy to be allowed into a Comic Con after Batman & Robin, how he had to explain to his new wife why they were honeymooning at said Comic Con or offering to spill all the secrets of Tomorrowland to the crowd, Clooney charmed the audience with some good old fashioned movie star charisma. He didn’t add too much to the overall discussion about the film, but his appearance marked the high point of the panel.
