Dadnology Week 30: Comic-Con Takes Over Everything
Week 30, 2026: San Diego Comic-Con swallowed the news cycle whole — Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider, Wolverine dated for September, a second LEGO Star Trek set, and an Avatar film that quietly moved up two months.
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🎪 The Week That Was — Comic-Con Ate the Calendar
Some weeks you have to hunt for a through-line. Not this one. San Diego Comic-Con ran July 22–26 and swallowed the entire news cycle, and unusually for a convention week, most of what came out of it was substance rather than sizzle: hard release dates, real casting, and a couple of genuine surprises.
The headline is that Marvel came back to Hall H for the first time in two years and spent its hour selling 2028 rather than December — Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider, Black Panther III dated for December 2028 with a grown T’Challa II, and Avengers: Endgame returning to cinemas in September with new footage stitched in. Gaming got the release date it wanted (Marvel’s Wolverine, September 15), Middle-earth got one too (Rings of Power season 3, November 11), and LEGO used its booth to reveal a second Star Trek set plus an interactive booth experience that hints at where its “smart brick” tech is heading.
And then, almost entirely outside the Comic-Con noise, the story with the most immediate impact on this weekend: the Avatar Studios film quietly moved its release up by more than two months — a change a lot of coverage still hasn’t caught up with. Sorted by vertical below.
Jump to: 🎬 Movies & TV · 🎮 Gaming · 🧱 LEGO & Family
🎬 Movie & TV News This Week
Marvel’s Hall H return put hard dates on 2028
Marvel Studios’ Saturday panel was the week’s biggest single event, and we broke it down in full in our Hall H recap. The short version: Ryan Gosling is Ghost Rider, directed by Shawn Levy for 2028. Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther III lands December 15, 2028, shot on film, with David Jonsson playing a now-grown T’Challa II — the most careful way through the hardest continuity problem in the MCU. And Avengers: Endgame returns to cinemas on September 25 as Endgame Encore, with brand-new footage set inside the Doomsday story added to the three-hour runtime.
The Russos also screened new Avengers: Doomsday footage and confirmed Hayley Atwell returns as Peggy Carter. Worth separating two things a lot of coverage is mixing up: the official trailer from July 20 is freely available (and embedded in our breakdown), while the longer cut screened in Hall H on the 25th has not been released — leaked phone recordings of it are circulating, and we don’t link those. Conspicuously absent from the whole panel: Secret Wars and the X-Men reboot.
AdAvengers: Endgame (4K Ultra HD) (opens in a new tab)
The home version, ahead of the Endgame Encore cinema re-release on September 25 that adds new Doomsday footage.
The Avatar movie moved up — and a lot of coverage still has it wrong
This is the correction we’d most want you to catch. The Avatar Studios film — now retitled Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, dropped from The Legend of Aang — released on Paramount+ on July 25, not October 9 as originally announced. The reason is a leak: the full film escaped online in April, and Paramount responded by renaming it (making pirated copies harder to search for) and pulling the release forward by more than two months. Our full breakdown of the change has the details.
Separately, the series Avatar: Seven Havens got its first teaser at Comic-Con and a confirmed October 9 premiere — its own date, not shared with the film. It follows twin Avatars Pavi and Nisha in a world where the Avatar is feared as a destroyer rather than welcomed as a savior, which is the boldest premise this franchise has attempted.
Rings of Power season 3 finally reaches the One Ring
Prime Video premiered the Rings of Power season 3 teaser in Hall H, with the season landing November 11. Five years after the fall of Eregion, Sauron rules from a completed Barad-dûr and moves to forge the One Ring — the beat that finally connects this show to the films. Eight episodes on a staggered schedule: four on day one, then pairs on November 18 and 25.
Lanterns, and a divisive Alan Ritchson thriller
HBO’s Lanterns got its premiere date — August 16 — with Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre as Hal Jordan and John Stewart, co-created by Damon Lindelof and Tom King. And in cinemas, Motor City arrived: Alan Ritchson’s near-wordless 1970s Detroit revenge thriller, which critics admire for its craft and criticise for its script in roughly equal measure.
🎮 Gaming News for Dads
Marvel’s Wolverine is dated — and it isn’t a family game
Insomniac dropped a full story trailer and a hard date: Marvel’s Wolverine arrives September 15 on PS5. The trailer confirms Jean Grey, Lady Deathstrike and the Hand, with Sabretooth as a reluctant partner and a prequel comic pointing at Mr. Sinister as the real architect.
The part worth internalising before pre-ordering: Insomniac’s Spider-Man games are among the few AAA titles you can genuinely play with a kid watching. Wolverine is not that. It’s mature-rated, built around a character whose entire toolkit is stabbing, and the trailer makes no attempt to soften it. If the PS5 lives in the living room, plan for headphones and after bedtime.
Star Wars: Zero Company brings the Clone Wars voices back
Ahead of its August 27 launch, Star Wars: Zero Company revealed its cast — and it’s a real reunion: Matt Lanter returns as Anakin Skywalker and Dee Bradley Baker voices the squad’s lead clone, both reprising Clone Wars roles. For a turn-based tactics game built around an original squad, getting those two back is the strongest signal yet that Lucasfilm is treating this as a genuine extension of that era rather than a licensing exercise.
🧱 LEGO & Family Round-up
A second LEGO Star Trek set, and this one you can play with
LEGO revealed the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 Bridge (11385) — its second-ever Star Trek set, and a very different proposition from the first. Where the Enterprise-D (10356) is a ship exterior you display, the Bridge is an interior you populate: 1,701 pieces (a deliberate nod to the ship’s registry), eight new minifigures covering the original crew, four tribbles, a rocking captain’s chair, a working transporter dial and turbo lift doors on a lever. $199.99, pre-order now, ships September 1 — landing right in Star Trek’s 60th anniversary year.
AdLEGO Icons Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D (10356) (opens in a new tab)
The first LEGO Star Trek set, available now — and the display partner for the Bridge set revealed this week.
The booth that hints at LEGO’s next decade
LEGO’s other Comic-Con play was the SMART Play Gateway — a walk-through “interworld departure terminal” that drops visitors into either a LEGO Pokémon Trainer Centre or a Mos Eisley Cantina, powered by the new LEGO SMART Brick tech. You can’t buy it; it’s a convention experience. But the technology behind it is real and recently launched, and using it for something this elaborate suggests LEGO sees a retail future for sensor-driven sets rather than a one-off gimmick. That’s the thing we’ll actually be watching for later this year.
Dadnology Take
Comic-Con weeks usually generate more noise than news. This one didn’t: hard dates on Ghost Rider, Black Panther III, Wolverine and Rings of Power is a genuinely useful haul, and Marvel finally looks like a studio with a plan rather than a release schedule. But the single most actionable item this week isn’t from the convention floor at all — it’s that the Avatar Aang movie is already out, two months early, and a lot of people still have October in their calendar. If you want one thing to do with this roundup: fix that date, and put September 25 down for Endgame on a big screen. And on the Doomsday trailer everyone’s talking about — watch the official July one, which is great; the extra Hall H cut hasn’t released, and a leaked phone recording isn’t a release.
The Dadnology Week archive: missed last week? Catch up with Dadnology Week 29.
❓ FAQ
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