Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ Black Panther stole the show Saturday night at Marvel Studios’ Comic-Con presentation. Fans at the San Diego convention went wild for the exclusive sneak peek at the upcoming superhero film, featuring star Chadwick Boseman’s character, T’Challa, intercepting a sketchy vibranium trade between Andy Serkis’ Klaw and Martin Freeman’s Everett. Set in an elegant casino, the deal goes haywire and T’Challa and his security detail, played by Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira, jump to action in their evening gowns to retrieve the precious goods. The clip was followed by the trailer for the film, and the crowd of 6,500 broke into deafening cheers at the sight of T’Challa donning the Black Panther suit. Marvel Studios also teased its third Thor film, Thor: Ragnarok, which has a different and more irreverent tone than previous installments. The film hits theaters in November. “I’ve played this character five times,” said the movie’s star, Chris Hemsworth. “Me, personally, I got a little bored and thought we’ve got to try something a little different … push the envelope, take it to another level.”
■ It was a typical phone call between two boys and their mother, who was on vacation in France. It was brief — the boys wanted to get back to playing with their cousins, not spend time on the phone chatting. The brevity of that 1997 call haunts Prince William and Prince Harry to this day — for their mother, Princess Diana, would die in a car crash that night. “Harry and I were in a desperate rush to say goodbye, you know, ‘See you later.’… If I’d known now obviously what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been so blase about it and everything else,” William said in a new documentary. “But that phone call sticks in my mind, quite heavily.” Harry said the final chat is something he will regret until the end of his days. “Looking back on it now, it’s incredibly hard. I’ll have to sort of deal with that for the rest of my life,” Harry said. “Not knowing that was the last time I was going to speak to my mum. How differently that conversation would have panned out if I’d had even the slightest inkling her life was going to be taken that night.” The documentary — Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy — is airing today on Britain’s ITV. Excerpts from the film and new family photographs were released Sunday. The show is a tribute to Diana as the 20th anniversary of her August 31, 1997, death approaches. It is only in the past year that William and Harry have spoken openly in public about their feelings about the sudden loss of their mother. William, second in line for the British throne, was only 15 at the time of her death. Harry was 12.