Clones Rule as Hollywood Beats Drum at Comic-Con

SAN DIEGO â€" Legendary Entertainment came to Comic-Con last year promoting “Pacific Rim” with all the attending buzz, hype and chatter. Then, a week and a half ago, came the release.

Thud.

On Saturday, Legendary was back here promoting another world-in-ruins monster movie, “Godzilla.” Sneak-peek footage drew cheers (and its monstrous thumps shook much of the vast convention center). But the elaborate presentation â€" along with similar ones made by studios like Sony and 20th Century Fox â€" also raised a question that has been lingering in movie theaters all summer: Does serving up more of the same still deliver the same punch?

Comic-Con, a pop culture convention that drew roughly 140,000 fans to this breezy city over the last four days, has for years been seen as a read of the mass marketplace, even as many here seemed to be more interested in the convention’s less mainstream offerings. What entertainment genres are on the rise? Which new movies are in trouble?

There were certainly some surprises. The 6,500 people who packed the San Diego Convention Center’s cavernous Hall H on Saturday, for instance, reacted with euphoria for “Gravity,” a science-fiction thriller starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts adrift in space. To simulate weightlessness, Warner Brothers mounted cameras on specially developed robotic arms.

“Totally original and different,” Ms. Bullock said, as fans nodded in agreement.

But “Gravity” was one of the few films pushing originality claims that seemed to actually deliver. Indeed, throughout Comic-Con, there was a sameness to the films, both to one another and to movies like “Pacific Rim” that have come before and failed.

The studio presentations for “Divergent” and “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones” were virtually interchangeable, with a female novelist and a young Everywoman star talking about bravery while flanked by a phalanx of young hunks sporting varying degrees of sensitivity and Commonwealth accents.

Change the names and faces, and they might have been selling “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.” Jennifer Lawrence, who stars in that dystopian series, appeared in Hall H twice on Saturday, returning for “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” the seventh installment of that superhero franchise, scheduled for 2014.

Studios also showcased another “Amazing Spider-Man,” another “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” another “Avengers,” another “Thor” and another “Captain America.” Warner at least spiced up its announcement of another “Man of Steel” by adding a new co-star: Batman.

In addition to “Godzilla,” remakes teased here in recent days included “RoboCop,” coming in February from Sony, and “Riddick,” a Universal Pictures continuation of Vin Diesel’s “Chronicles of Riddick” franchise.

Even many of the original movies introduced at Comic-Con this year had a been-there-done-that feeling to them, notably Legendary’s sword-and-sorcery picture “Seventh Son,” which co-stars Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore and Ben Barnes. In thundering snippets of footage shown on Saturday, the movie at times resembled “Clash of the Titans,” “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian,” which also starred Mr. Barnes.

Some of these films â€" however derivative of what has come before â€" will undoubtedly become global hits, showering studios and the media conglomerates that own them with profits. The first “Avengers” took in more than $1.5 billion at the box office and generated hundreds of millions in DVD and toy revenue.

Indeed, the potential returns are promising enough that several studio moguls personally came to Comic-Con to assess the fan reaction: Jim Gianopulos, Fox’s film chairman, turned up in dark 3-D glasses, while Kevin Tsujihara, Warner’s new chief executive, tried to blend in by wearing an untucked button-down shirt. Rob Friedman, co-chairman of Lionsgate’s motion picture group and in the running for the presidency of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in its election on July 30, mixed with the fans at his Summit label’s Thursday presentation.

But even as studios came to the bubble of Comic-Con to unveil their megamovies â€" all will have budgets of $100 million or more, and sometimes much more â€" real-world ticket buyers were showing increasing fatigue with the same old, same old.

“Pacific Rim,” which cost Legendary and Warner at least $180 million to make and about $150 million to market globally, has taken in about $178.5 million, roughly half of which goes to theater owners. But it is not alone: six big-budget movies have crash-landed since May 1, including “White House Down,” “The Lone Ranger” and â€" over the weekend â€" “Turbo” and “R.I.P.D.,” which cost Universal Pictures $130 million to make and took in about $12.8 million.

“R.I.P.D.” also starred Mr. Bridges, who made no mention of its failure on Saturday in Hall H. But the actor did work hard to make “Seventh Son” sound intriguing, telling attendees that the film, set for release in January, is “chock-full o’ myths and magic and all kinds of things like that.” He even threw in a quote from the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

But Mr. Bridges’s assurances did not quite seem to convince the crowd, whose response to the “Seventh Son” panel was more polite than thrilled. (Legendary’s chief executive, Thomas Tull, declined an interview request.)

The people who swarm Comic-Con generally have an insatiable appetite for films in the superhero, fantasy, science-fiction and animation genres. At a couple of moments over the weekend, however, even attendees seemed to be growing frustrated with the sameness of the films Hollywood is giving them.

At one point during a question-and-answer session for “The Lego Movie,” a coming animated picture, a young boy came to the microphone and pressed panelists to say what in the film had “never been done before.”

Asked what he would hope to see, the boy, about 10 years old, said, “a little bit of CG, but not too much,” referring to computer graphics. The crowd cheered.

“You’re going to love the movie,” one of the film’s directors, Phil Lord, promised. “This is the weirdest kids’ film, I’m pretty sure, that has ever been committed to celluloid,” he added.

The boy flatly responded, “I hope so,” and turned heel.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 22, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Clones Rule As Hollywood Beats Drum At Comic-Con .