As you are all aware, we’re in the midst of the 2009 New York Comic Con. Today is a busy day with a lot going on; but for the moment, I’m here to share with you the occurrences of the Terminator Salvation panel.

The film’s director, McG, was the main man of course, and he covered many different areas of the project. Nothing breaking, but he did go into detail about the angle of the movie and when a certain question about Linda Hamilton‘s Sarah Connor character came up, let’s just say he gave a few hints about that. He also debuted some new footage, some of what which was not fully rendered yet, but was nevertheless met with much enthusiasm from the fans at the panel. Oh, and did anyone know that Michael Ironside is in this movie? Well he sure as hell is!

McG began by telling the story of how he went to Terminator‘s director James Cameron on the set of Avatar to basically get his blessing as well as see Sam Worthington, who’s also in Terminator Salvation. If you’re not familiar with this story, Cameron basically said that he wouldn’t give the movie his support, but he “…wasn’t going to shit on it either.” He didn’t feel there was any need for it, but what they were doing did sound interesting enough, so he wished it well. Cameron also went on to tell the story of how he went in to do Aliens behind Ridley Scott and everyone was asking who the hell James Cameron was — so this is all sort of poetic in a way.

Then was the story of how, in order to get him to sign on, Christian Bale made them fix the script until it was about the story and the characters and not the explosions (probably the best thing that could happen, as mindless explosions would have definitely doomed this venture). This brought about the hiring of Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight) to do some rewrites and fix it all up.

Disney has put a new version of the Jules Verve classic titled 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo on the fast track and signed Terminator Salvation director McG to helm it.

Not many details are known, but the movie will supposedly follow Captain Nemo and the creation of his ship, The Nautilus. It’s being written by Bill Marsilli (Deja Vu).

McG is also in discussions to oversee development and direct the next film in the Terminator trilogy, which is a surprise to me, as I thought he was already in as director on all three. This likely means that Captain Nemo will be one fast-moving project, one Disney apparently wants THIS year.

On his production blog, director McG announced that Terminator Salvation has indeed wrapped principal photography and that it’s now well into its post-production work.

This is always a good sign that things are moving forward smoothly, you know, well-oiled machine and such. Now we just need to hope that not too many re-shoots have to be done; specifically for the ending.

McG said that a cut of the film was shown to stars Christian Bale and Sam Worthington who both seem to have liked where it was going.

While McG wants this particular installment to focus much more on characters and the storyline, he hasn’t forgotten what the previous films did for the world of special effects.