New York Comic Con wrapped up this weekend in its usual state of happy exhaustion, leaving behind a heap of announcements, a few sizzle reels that only the people in the room actually saw, and one queue that is presumably still shuffling round the Javits Center. We have already covered Blade Runner 2099’s replicant takeover and Avatar Kuruk’s gap year. Here is everything else worth knowing: Bill Nighy joins Starfleet just as it starts packing up, a horror film that audiences hated wins the weekend anyway, Glasgow hands out the British Fantasy Awards, and a bear of very little brain turns one hundred.
Top Of The Pile: Bill Nighy Enrols At Starfleet Academy, Just In Time For Graduation
Saturday’s Star Trek panel confirmed that Star Trek: Starfleet Academy season two will arrive on Paramount+ in March 2027, exact date to follow. TrekCore reports that this will be the show’s final ten-episode run, which would make it the shortest-lived live-action Trek series to date. The cadets go out with some heavyweight guests. Bill Nighy plays Nyk, the estranged father of Holly Hunter’s Chancellor Ake, and Rosemarie DeWitt plays Laytha Sadal, First Lady of Betazed and mother of cadet Tarima. Ruaridh Aldington also joins as Keats, a young alien the cadets bring back to the Academy before discovering he is a wanted man. Nighy has already been Davy Jones, Slartibartfast and a vampire elder in Underworld, and he played the gallery curator moved to tears by Van Gogh in Doctor Who. Playing Holly Hunter’s difficult dad is surely the easiest gig on that list.
The same panel marked Trek’s sixtieth anniversary by putting William Shatner, 95, on stage with Ben Stiller. Before the show, Shatner told Entertainment Weekly that the franchise was “a phenomenon that in our lifetime can’t be repeated.” Asked about its secret, he offered: “Me? Maybe it is me.” Sixty years in, he is still landing the punchline.
Box Office: Other Mommy Gets A D+ And Goes To The Top Of The Class
Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, which we first met as a trailer, took the US box office this weekend with an estimated $27.5 million, according to Deadline. That is well ahead of Universal’s own $20 million projection, and on a reported budget of $19 million. The audience who paid for it are less impressed. Opening-night viewers gave it a D+ CinemaScore, which Cosmic Book News notes is the lowest grade for any film since Megalopolis in September 2024. Critics had already sharpened their knives, so the Blumhouse/Atomic Monster film, starring Jessica Chastain and adapted from Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House, has now been panned by both the professionals and the punters, and outsold everything regardless. Horror has long been critic-proof. Apparently it is now audience-proof as well. Treat the figures as Sunday estimates until Monday’s actuals arrive.
Savage, a British director who made his name with the lockdown Zoom séance Host, isn’t hanging about. At BlumFest on Friday he announced his next film, Molepeople, a New York-set subterranean horror starring LaKeith Stanfield. Anyone who has spent much time on the Northern line will recognise the premise.
NYCC Odds And Ends
Something is directing the children. Blumhouse has named Craig Zobel, director of The Hunt and Mare of Easttown, to direct its live-action film of Something Is Killing the Children, James Tynion IV and Werther Dell’Edera’s BOOM! Studios horror comic about Erica Slaughter and the monsters only children can see. An adult animated series is being developed alongside it. As The Beat notes, there is no date yet for either. The same panel had YouTuber MatPat teaming up with Blumhouse, starting with a film of the indie horror game Amanda the Adventurer, and unveiled the studio’s 2027 slate, which The Hollywood Reporter has rounded up.
The lizard’s back-room boys. Godzilla Minus Zero brought the Oscar-winning visual effects and sound team from Minus One to New York on Saturday for a behind-the-scenes panel rather than a new trailer, so the big lad remained politely offstage. British fans don’t have long to wait, with the film stomping into UK and Irish IMAX screens from 6th November. Even the popcorn bucket is enormous.
Ninjas, reunited. At Saturday’s “NARUTO: What’s Next?” stage, timed for the hero’s birthday, the promised limited anime series turned out to be, according to reports from the panel, a crossover with Kōji Kiriyama’s 1990s Shōnen Jump series Ninku. There was a trailer but no title, studio, episode count or date, so treat the details as provisional until Viz or Shueisha publish something firmer. Fans who remember the anniversary episodes shelved in 2023 will be keeping their kunai sheathed for now.
Elsewhere at the convention: Lucasfilm Publishing laid out its 2027 books and comics for the fiftieth anniversary of A New Hope, which means a great many more books set in the twenty minutes before something explodes, and Adult Swim confirmed that Common Side Effects returns for a second season in January.
Awards: Glasgow Hands Out The British Fantasy Awards
The British Fantasy Society announced its 2026 winners at FantasyCon in Glasgow on Saturday. Titan Books took both of the big novel prizes: the Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel went to Kell Woods’s Upon a Starlit Tide, and the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel to Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Amal El-Mohtar won Best Novella for The River Has Roots, and Annabel Campbell, who missed out on the fantasy novel prize, collected Best Newcomer for The Outcast Mage instead. CL Hellisen won twice, for the short story “Shadow Jack” and the Audible Original The Shape of Monsters (shared with Omari Douglas), a double that should make for an interesting trophy shelf.
Best Independent Press went to Ian Whates’s NewCon Press, a well-deserved pat on the back for one of the hardest-working small presses in British SF. Other winners were Silk and Sinew, edited by Kristy Park Kulski (anthology), Christopher Caldwell’s Call and Response (collection), Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke’s Nigerian Speculative Fiction: Evolution (non-fiction), Remains (magazine), The Folklore Podcast (non-fiction audio) and Jenni Coutts (artist). The Karl Edward Wagner Award went to Jane Johnson, and Chloe Yates received the Legends of FantasyCon award. Next year’s FantasyCon, in Birmingham, will also host the World Fantasy Awards, so the Second City had better start polishing its cutlery.
Anniversaries: Pooh Turns 100 (And Is Still Recovering From The Last Few Years)
On Wednesday, 14th October, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh turns one hundred, Methuen having first published it in 1926. Disney and Farshore are running centenary campaigns of the honey-and-balloons variety, and the bear deserves every bit of it. Genre readers will remember that the bear’s more recent history has been rather less cosy. When the original book entered the US public domain in 2022, it took British independent film-makers only a year to turn him into the masked killer of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, which Mark Kermode reviewed for us with remarkable patience. Plans for a whole spin-off universe of corrupted childhood favourites followed. Centuries from now, archaeologists will have a great deal of explaining to do about the Hundred Acre Wood.
Collectables: Your Father’s Lightsaber, Yours For A Million
The lightsaber Darth Vader used in The Empire Strikes Back‘s Cloud City duel, the one in which he passes on some awkward family news, goes up for sale at Heritage Auctions’ Ultimate Star Wars Auction on 12th November with an estimate of at least $1 million, NBC reports. The prop also turned up in Return of the Jedi. That estimate looks modest next to the $3.6 million a Vader lightsaber fetched last September. Whoever wins it will own a piece of cinema history, though it may not survive being swung at the cat.
Still Waiting: Lanterns In Limbo
HBO’s Lanterns has finished its first season with record numbers and a flurry of “season two confirmed!” headlines, none of which, strictly speaking, is true. Damon Lindelof has said the writers are “ideating”, co-showrunner Chris Mundy says there is “nothing official”, and HBO has said nothing at all. Until somebody signs a contract, the Green Lantern oath is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
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