The official schedule and times for the biggest TV, movie, and gaming panels at San Diego Comic-Con 2023 are now available to the public.

Due to the ongoing writers and actors’ strikes taking the headlines in Hollywood, Comic-Con 2023 won’t come with the usual flash and pizzazz as Cons of years past. 

After all, fans learned about Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars while seeing Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson don his Black Adam costume for a panel just last year alone.

But even without those A-list headliners and blockbuster announcements, studios like Disney and Warner Bros. will do their best to make this year one to remember.

When Are Comic-Con 2023’s Panels? 

San Diego Comic-Con 2023 will take place between Thursday, July 20, and Sunday, July 23 and include panels for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on Thursday, My Adventures with Superman and Rick and Morty on Friday, and both Star Trek and Star Wars on Sunday. 

Below is the schedule of panels that we expect to bring the biggest pop in the worlds of movies, television, and gaming…

THURSDAY, JULY 20

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET — Max Original Animation 

• Exclusive looks at Max’s animated series such as Adventure Time, the new Young Love, and Season 4 of Harley Quinn come in this panel.

11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET — Paramount Pictures: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

• Paramount Pictures’ panel discussion about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem before it comes to theaters on Friday, August 2.

2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. ET — Marvel’s Spider-Man 2: Symbiotic Relationships

4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. ET — Designing the X-Men: A This Week in Marvel Special Event

• Marvel Comics takes the spotlight as fans learn how some of the biggest names from the X-Men stories are drawn.

FRIDAY, JULY 21

11:00 p.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET — My Adventures with Superman

• Fans get an early look at Episode 4 of My Adventures with Superman, along with commentary from the cast and crew.

1:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. ET — The Walking Dead Universe  

• Four new series from the Walking Dead universe take the spotlight, including a sneak peek at The Walking Dead: Dead City’s season finale coming on Sunday, July 23.

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. ET — Rick and Morty 10th Anniversary  

3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.  ET — Peacock’s The Continental: From the World of John Wick

3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. ET — Solar Opposites

• The animated Solar Opposites series dives into new rounds of chaos as the series gets a look at its fourth season in this panel.

4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. ET — Invincible 20th Anniversary Panel  

• The Invincible comic book series celebrates its 20th anniversary with its creative team and publishers.

5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. ET — Bob’s Burgers  

• Bob’s Burgers will show off a first look at an upcoming episode with a room full of fans waiting for the show’s return.

SATURDAY, JULY 22

11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. ET — Futurama

12:45 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. ET — Family Guy  

• Season 22 of Family Guy returns this fall, with the Griffins taking center stage as fans get a tease of new episodes.

1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. ET — Star Trek Universe 

• Star Trek returns with reveals and surprises from Discovery, Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds, and fans get to see the upcoming crossover episode between Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks.

5:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. — Star Wars Outlaws: Becoming the Galaxy’s Most Wanted 

• The new Star Wars Outlaws video game will get a panel featuring a number of executives and voice talents from the projects.

Who Will Be at San Diego Comic-Con?

Due to the ongoing strikes from the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG), there are no guarantees of who will actually be present at these panels other than possibly some studio executives.

There will also be a couple of more comic-centric panels from both Marvel and DC taking place, which should have crowds excited even without new updates from the MCU or DCU.

Now, the big question moving forward is when exactly viewers will find out new information on the TV shows and movies from these universes, especially with multiple projects shut down due to the strikes.

The hope is that things will be back in motion before too long, although many are preparing for extended breaks in the news, which studios are already accounting for with special TV releases.

San Diego Comic-Con 2023 takes place between Thursday, July 20, and Sunday, July 23.

As Star Wars fans tell it, the 1977 film was nearly doomed. Graced by the magic fingers of George Lucas’s wife, Marcia Lucas, the sci-fi space opera was “saved in the editing.”

This has a ring of truth to it, but not quite in the way that you might think. Though the new team of editors is presented as the heroes in this story, that ignores how films — then and now — are made. Star Wars was no different from any film ever made, it too just another messy, arduous scramble.

At the heart of this specific Star Wars myth lies the “lost cut,” an abandoned edit that was so bad that the film needed to be completely re-edited from beginning to end. The odd segments were pruned to allow the movie to flourish. Many of the doomed scenes, subplots, and characters in said lost cut were discarded only to pop up in DVD releases or special editions decades later, proving their existence.

One look at a sampling of the scenes left on the cutting room floor, and it becomes apparent why. No director really knows what works until they see it on film. That’s no one’s fault.

Is there really a “lost cut” of Star Wars? Yes, because it has been screened. Also, no, because there is no single “lost cut,” and it is not entirely clear if this version in question was ever intended to be a real edit. Before the film was completed things were already getting complicated, and they only got more muddled in following years.

False Starts

Running over three hours, the task of hewing the heap of celluloid initially fell to John Jympson, Lucas wanting to see what he had before effects were added in post-production by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). Sensing the film lacked heart and coherence, on the brink of a heart attack, Lucas opted for someone he trusted more, his wife Marcia. She had her work cut out for her, the climactic battle alone coming to 40,000 feet of film (via George Lucas: A Life). Lucas boasted, “I think it took her eight week to cut that battle.”

She needed help. With the work of two more extra editors slaving in the cutting room, Lucas’ project was given a jolt of pathos, Paul Hirsch, Marcia Lucas, and Richard Chew eventually winning an Oscar for their toil, each overwhelmed by the task. Chew commented it was necessary to “let the actors’ rhythms dictate the cuts rather than having the cuts drive the rhythm of the scenes,” allowing the characters to propel the plot not the dry mechanics of the script. That’s about the most expert opinion we have on the lost cut. However, to say that they saved the movie is meaningless. Editing makes or breaks every film. Go look at any one of the hundred versions of Blade Runner for further elucidation.

Related: Why Star Wars Should’ve Stayed a Trilogy

According to available sources, Lucas took offense at the haphazard way Jympson paced the action. Also of note, there was much debate which takes were the best ones. The drama behind the set had as much to do with a clash of personalities as it did with the edit, if we are really being honest, Lucas in constant conflict with his editor Jympson and the cinematographer. By the end of filming, both were trashing him behind his back. Jympson might have produced a terrific edit himself for Lucas given a few months to do the work it took three editors to pull off, but the two men’s working relationship was beyond repair. According to most have seen both versions, the original and theatrical 1977 cut, audiences lucked out. Then, what of the original version as edited by Jympson?

Unearthing the “Holy Grail”

For years the first draft of the film was forgotten. Who better to dig up the past than David West Reynolds, an actual archaeologist? Having spent some years in the early nineties trying to locate the set of Luke’s Skywalker’s childhood home in the desert of Tunisia, Reynolds turned to the original work-print.

Reynolds had become close to George Lucas, and was given unprecedented access to rare materials and secret information. A writer for the magazine Star Wars Insider, Reynolds described one such exotic curiosity he had the pleasure to watch, the unaltered base that all future iterations of the movie were built upon. After decades in storage, the so-called “lost cut” was publicized to the world. It was not so lost after all, and, if digitized, likely in decent shape unlike most nitrate film.

Related: The Lord of the Rings: How Different are the Extended Editions?

Don’t get excited. Barring a change of heart, Lucas — who sold away Lucasfilm rights in 2012 — will never reveal this work-in-progress copy. As the copyright of the film is now in the hands of Disney (as are the characters and the work print), the right to distribute the film is presumably not something Lucas has any say in. To say nothing of which “cut” would qualify as the “lost” version, seeing as there are traditionally multiple rough cuts made during filming, both with and without effects, without audio dubs (Darth Vader’s spine-chilling voice not added in until after the film wrapped), different takes with different blocking, and unedited scenes later tweaked for the theatrical release.

The Next Best Thing?

There is yet another lost Star Wars, that one being the version that was shown in theaters in August 1977. Lucas has gotten carried away with re-editing existing classics in his time, and no film has fallen prey more than the first Star Wars film, aka Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. Even that title was retroactively “enhanced.” This time we might just be able to bypass Lucasfilm and Disney altogether.

And here it really starts to get tricky. Fan edits, even for the noblest purposes of preservation, are outside traditional boundaries of fair use, their legality not immediately justifiable. Over the years, fans have cobbled together bits of pieces of releases from different medium, Laserdiscs, VHS tapes, etc. to make one single “Despecialized Edition.” This is an imperfect science, each clip of varying audio and visual fidelity, requiring the audio from one film to be stapled onto the picture of another reel, skipping around where necessary, the differences in clarity, resolution, and color grading a dead giveaway.

As the title suggests, this version completely excises all the superfluous enhancements and late additions that have divided fans for years, removing the offending Han vs Greedo re-edit in an attempt to recapture the authentic Star Wars. One such source, known as “Puggo Grande” (a digitized 16mm widescreen cut of the film) is frequently used as a guide to indicate where Lucas made cuts and slipped in new footage or added new effects. The donor of this intact, albeit grainy film, wished to remain anonymous, the only real clue we have is that some clips bore Swedish subtitles.

Many of these copies are currently circulating around the web. For legal reasons, we will not post links to them, but their existence, and the whole of the lost cut preservation project, raises a necessary point about when art should be preserved and whom should be entrusted to undertake that preservation. Countless writers before Lucas have instructed their notes or unfinished work to be destroyed, putting him in some esteemed company. But Star Wars, whether George likes it or not, is now bigger than him.