Has the thrill of San Diego Comic-Con waned (gasp!) in the last few years? Is the scheduling for the San Diego, Chicago or New York Cons not ideal for you? Or, would your love of comics, games and movies inspire you to travel internationally (this writer is definitely in that camp)? If you fit into any or all of these categories, then today’s your lucky day! Mark Millar is about to become your new hero (if he isn’t already)!

Millar (Kick-Ass, Wanted, Civil War) has announced that he is launching a Comic Con-themed event for the UK market next April. The Kapow Comic Con will take over London’s Business Design Centre on April 9 and 10, 2011 and be dedicated to the world of comics, movies, TV, games and more.

Stars from Hollywood and TV-land have yet to be announced, but Dave Gibbons, John Romita Jr, Frank Quitely, Bryan Hitch and Andy Diggle have all been confirmed for attendance.

Kapow will also introduce the Stan Lee Awards, which will pay tribute to the comic book legend by giving recipients gong statues for Best Comic, Best Superhero or Sci-Fi Movie and Best Comic Book Hero among others.

For more information, check out the official Kapow Comic Con site. See you in London!

Muppets are becoming more of the “hip” thing, as big stars keep finding themselves cast in the newest film. Ricky Gervais and Emily Blunt are the latest high-profile celebrities to join the growing list of cameos in Disney’s newest Muppets movie. The specifics behind their cameos have yet to be announced.

The Hollywood Reporter has announced that the duo are joining a packed lineup that includes Alan Arkin, Jack Black, Billy Crystal, Zach Galifianakis and Jean-Claude Van Damme, who have appearances in a story that reunites the Muppets in order to save their movie studio from a developer. I smell musical numbers!

The new Muppets flick, directed by James Bobin, is currently being filmed in various locations around Los Angeles. Jason Segel, who co-wrote the script with Nicholas Stoller, is the human lead (no surprise here after his vampire number in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) while Amy Adams, Chris Cooper and Rashida Jones round out the cast of human leads.

Stay tuned to The Flickcast for the latest developments on the new Muppets movie.

To the relief and delight of fans everywhere, Futurama finally returned to Comedy Central in June, with an anticipated season of 26 new episodes that will air through the rest of 2010 and into 2011. Riding the wave of elation and acclaim (what Comic-Con wouldn’t be complete without the presence of Groening) Matt Groening (Creator) and David X. Cohen (Executive Producer) shared their ideas for the future of Futurama and what they love most about being in San Diego for Comic-Con.

Groening thanked the fans who are devoted to the show and attributed Futurama‘s return to their persistence. He also teased fans with the vague spoiler of two characters kissing in an upcoming episode, but that it will be completely unexpected and the audience won’t see it coming (anyone want to start a betting pool?).

Fans who are patiently waiting for the early seasons of not only Futurama and The Simpsons to be released on Blu-Ray are going to be waiting for a while. There aren’t any current plans for their release, but they will be available on Laser-Disc very soon!

As for the future of the show, Groening stated that back when he was developing the show with David X. Cohen, they made a list of all the things they wanted to write about, and they still haven’t exhausted that list. Additionally, he revealed that there aren’t any current plans to do direct to DVD movies, but that the ultimate goal would be to develop and release a full-length film that will be released in theaters.

Julie Benz appears to have gone from victim to hero in one fell swoop. After leaving behind Rita Morgan after four seasons on Dexter, the actress is primed to portray Stephanie Powell on ABC’s upcoming family show, No Ordinary Family.  No longer the dead body in the bathtub, Powell is a busy professional scientist and researcher who develops super speed following a crash landing in the Amazon on a trip with her family. After deciding to move on from Dexter, Renz related that she was looking for a new challenge and the character of Stephanie was just what she was looking for.

“When pilot season started, my quest was to find a character that was strong female character, a character that is more active than Rita. I was getting offered a lot of parts that were similar to her and I was turning them down because I wanted to find something that was different.”

While there might be the temptation to compare Rita with Stephanie, Benz insists that she didn’t pull inspiration from portraying a mother on a previous show. For one thing, the personalities are incredibly different.

“I think they’re both mothers, but other than that, there’s really no commonality. Rita was not career driven at all, she was very dependent, very damaged with a lot of  vulnerabilities, very emotional. Stephanie’s very controlled, a Type A personality, goal oriented and has a hard time interacting with her own family.”

In his first TV show since retiring the role of Vic Mackey in The Shield, Michael Chiklis will soon be bounding into your living room as Jim Powell, a police sketch artist who receives the supernatural powers of super-strength, the ability to be bullet-proof and can leap buildings in a…well, you get the idea.

We caught up with Chiklis at San Diego’s Comic-Con and talked to him about his upcoming role and how it is and isn’t a departure from characters he’s portrayed in the past. After all, how do you follow up Vic Mackey by playing another cop?

“Here we have a family show at its core, wrapped in a police procedural, wrapped in a superhero show. That’s something I’ve not seen before. If The Shield lacked any credibility at all, it was the fact that Mackey didn’t have an aneurysm. Seven years of that can wreck havoc on your nervous system and it’s really kind of great and refreshing to do something that I can sit with my family and watch. My eleven year old was starting to question whether I was even an actor. She’s like, ‘dad, do you really act? I can’t see anything you’re in.’”

The concept behind No Ordinary Family will sound familiar to Fantastic Four and The Incredibles fans, but there hasn’t been an adaptation in this vein developed for television in recent memory. Sure, four characters get powers (strength, super speed, telepathy and super intelligence) and yes, it’s combined within a family that is struggling to stay connected and important to each other. But what would you rather see? Superheroes or more Cops?

“I thought it was long overdue. I did the Fantastic Four movies and I’ve been a comic book geek for a long time, since I was a kid. It’s funny though, a bunch of people have said to me, almost as if there’s been tons and tons of superhero shows on television, and to mind, I only can think of one, really in the last 20 years, which is Heroes, which is a decidedly different show.

But I’m thinking, we’re on cop show 475,000 and no one goes, ‘oh really, another cop show?!’ And some people are all, oh you’re going to play another superhero again? Yes! This place (Comic-Con) isn’t getting smaller. Now they’re making more money at Comic-Con than they did at the SuperBowl. This is a genre that’s here to stay. And it’s only natural as a genre to explore the different shapes of it.”

On SGU Stargate Universe, actor Robert Carlyle plays Nicholas Rush, a Machiavellian-type character who isn’t a quite hero, but isn’t really the villain either. Not necessarily what you would expect to find from an actor who first garnered international attention playing a down on his luck steel worker in The Full Monty. At this year’s Comic-Con, Carlyle discussed his affection for the role of Rush and why he was drawn to it and the franchise as a whole.

“I’ve never played science fiction before.  It wasn’t something I was looking for, so when I spoke to (creators) Robert Cooper and Brad Wright about it, the first thing we discussed was was this guy doesn’t want to come back. My God, let me play that character! That’s a great place for an actor to be in. What’s going on in there?  And it hasn’t disappointed me so far.

“The premise of the show was what drew me in. Most space shows are about something. This is not really about anything. Right now, we don’t know what they’re doing out there. But, by the second season, you definitely do. The whole mission is revealed by the second season and I liked that. I like to keep the audience waiting.”

You might have noticed that we’re big fans of Battelstar Galactica here at The Flickcast, so we were thrilled at the chance to sit down and discuss the reimagined world that he has brought to life with fellow producer, Ron Moore. At a roundtable at this year’s Comic-Con, Eick discussed the future of Caprica over a bottle of Don Julio and when fans can expect another season to be announced and ready to go.

“I think we just finished what we’re calling Season 1.5. You will hear about the next season by August 15 or before. We’re still working out contracts, among other things.”

Since there are wildly divergent opinions between fans of Eick’s last creation, Battlestar Galactica, and fans of his current endeavor Caprica, we were curious to get his take on this on-going schism and if there was a way to keep both camps happy, or if it was something that they were even worried about.

“We knew to expect a greater mix with this, because we knew we were not going to develop it or market it as a spin off of Battlestar. We knew those fans might have expected it would be much more intensely easter eggy in terms of well, here’s how Laura Roslin got her name and all that kind of stuff, but we just knew we weren’t going to do a show like that.  We very consciously tried not to market it or complicate it like that. We just believed that the audience would discover the show, let the show find its way, finds its legs, tighten its focus and get better, which it does.

“By the way, Battlestar was initially just as divided but for completely different reasons. So, I think we had this whole contingency of fans of the original show who are boycotting it, so it doesn’t feel any different to me. The very first Comic-Con for Battlestar was like George W. Bush going up at an ACLU rally. We felt like pariahs the first time.”

During a Q&A session for Stargate Universe, actress Ming Na opened up about playing recurring character Camille Wray on the popular Syfy series. The actress was quite candid about her hesitations about taking on the role, advocating for a character that had depth beyond the obvious sex appeal.

“I had a small amount of hesitation because I wasn’t sure how they were going to write the character and what would come out of that particular character choice. But, after speaking with (creators) Robert Cooper and Brad Wright, I felt very comfortable that they were going to really give a great deal of respect and thought and it wasn’t just going to be eye candy with these two girls, you know, getting it on!”

Speaking of which, next season will feature more development between Camille and Sharon, her lover on Earth, and how the two of them handle being apart for so long.

“Yes, it gets a lot more complicated because there has been a lot of stress in their relationship, as with any long distance relationship, and this is a REALLY long distance relationship, you know, there’s a lot more tension built up now, even with a solid relationship like theirs, so it will be interesting.”

When Eva Mendes, Will Farrell, Adam McKay and Mark Wahlberg sit down for an interview, you can expect results to be anything but ordinary. Based on the camaraderie that was clearly present during a recent Q&A during SDCC, fans of the upcoming movie can expect a good time when the movie premiers later this summer.

Since this movie stars Will Farrell, one of the most obvious questions would be how much of the script was actually written, and how much was McKay allowing his actors to ad-lib and run with it. It turns out, McKay is so well prepared for this, he brings in a professional.

“For our bond company, we actually have to give them the exact percentages,” explained McKay. “So we brought in an actuary to break it down and this movie was 14.3789% was improvised and then the rest was scripted.”

A quick thinking Farrell noted, “that would be 86-85% scripted, if you round up.”

“It’s about 15-20% that is improvised, because we goof around in the scenes,” said McKay. “But the overall story structure obviously stays the same.”

Being a Buddy-Cop flick, comedic timing and approach are in the cards for both actors. Since Wahlberg isn’t a name that immediately springs to mind when you think summer comedy, how much did he end up learning from Farrell in the course of filming the movie?

Hey brother, can you spare, oh, $35,000? If so, I don’t have a bridge to sell you, but I do have a Tron Lightcycle you might be interested in. According to Gizmodo, there are five exclusive Lightcycles currently up for auction on eBay. They are being built by same team who replicated Batman’s Batpod earlier this year.

The Parker Brothers team is building 5 custom one off “Lightcycles” to the exact specs of the movie bikes. Each bike will be black with an accent color – 5 bikes with 5 different accent colors (red, blue, yellow, green, and orange). There will only be one bike made per color so if you must have a certain color, you better call now…

About the bikes themselves, the wheels are custom made 22″ x12″ dual hubless wheels with custom made tires (Hoosier is custom making 5 sets just for us specifically for this project). (Buyers will have the option of additional tires as needed) The frame is 2″ cold rolled and boxed hardened steel with carbon fiber/fiberglass bodies. Accent colors are neon glowing from behind frosted plexiglass and can be turned off or on with the flip of a switch.

Additionally, each bike will come with it’s own Tron helmet and the owner will be able to watch their bike being built on YouTube.

Going once…going twice…

Tron Legacy will be in theaters December 15.

Wanted actor James McAvoy has agreed to portray young Charles Xavier in X-Men: First Class, the origin story focusing on the friendship and eventual fallout between Professor X and Magneto. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox has characterized the film as the “epic beginning of the X-Men saga”

The film reportedly covers the time before Charles Xavier and Eric Lensherr became Professor X and Magneto. They were two young men discovering their powers for the first time and before they were archenemies, they were the closest of friends, working together, with other Mutants (some familiar, some new), to stop the greatest threat the world has ever known.

In the process, a rift between them opened, which began the eternal war between Magneto’s Brotherhood and Professor X’s X-Men. Plus, its spawned several movies, TV shows and comics.

Fox anticipates filming this summer in London, with the movie tentatively scheduled for a June 3, 2011, release.

Stay tuned to The Flickcast for the latest news on this X-Men origin story.

Speaking at the Time Warner investor day, Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Barry Meyer announced that  Sherlock Holmes 2 is slated for a December 16 2011 release. If that wasn’t enough to make your day, Meyer also revealed that the studio is getting close to giving the go-ahead for a movie about beloved DC Comics superhero Flash.

Based on reports from Meyer, 2011 is shaping up to be a huge year for Warner Bros., with roughly 25 movies slated for release. Among the biggest and most anticipated releases are:

— Red Riding Hood: April 22, 2011
— The Hangover 2: May 26
— Green Lantern (3D): June 17
— Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II (3D): July 15
— Journey to the Center of the Earth 2 (3D): Sept. 23
— Happy Feet 2 (3D): Nov. 18
— New Year’s Eve: Dec. 9

Meyer also made an important note that DC Comics characters are key parts of Warner’s future, teasing a July 20, 2012 release date for the Christopher Nolan’s latest Batman film, as well as a holiday season 2012 Superman film. Films featuring Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Mad magazine characters also in development.