The first Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was a surprising hit at the box office, paving the way for an inevitable sequel. Sony Pictures Animation brought the sequel’s crew and stars to San Diego today to meet the Comic-Con audience.

The panelists Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 included stars Bill Hader, Anna Faris, and Terry Crews along with directors Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn. Ralph Garman moderated the Sony panel. Andy Samberg, Kristen Schaal, and Will Forte also star with Hader, Faris, and Crews, and were featured in a pre-panel clip showing the actors attempting to cosplay as their animated characters.

The panel for The Expendables 2, the upcoming sequel to the surprise 2010 crackerjack action film which was written by and stars Sylvester Stallone, made an appearance in Hall H at the 2012 San Diego Comic Convention today.

The testosterone alpha male laden panel, comprised of Stallone, MMA champ Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren and actor cum politician cum actor again Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Yesterday no less an authority than President Camacho himself, Terry freakin’ Crews, promised us that a new trailer for The Expendables 2 would be arriving online today to put a blood-and-skull-splattered boot in our collective ass. Sure enough as I sit here with The Dirty Dozen, the original (and still best) of the all-star superteam action-adventures, playing in the background I sit here writing this: Today Crews’ loud and awful snarly promise was fulfilled.

You can watch the mighty new trailer here below.

I’m a huge fan of the first Expendables, but having re-watched it on Blu-ray recently it’s clear that the movie has serious problems when it comes to the narrative structure and the staging of the action sequences. Don’t get me wrong, Sylvester Stallone did a fine job directing the movie overall, especially when you take into account that he was also writing and starring in the movie at the same time (and taking some near-paralyzing injuries in the process). But when the aging but still active action hero announced that a new director would take the helm of The Expendables 2 while he stuck to acting duties I took a great amount of relief in that news.

The latest trend for the major movie studios out there is to release a trailer for the trailer. Prometheus has done it, we’ve seen one for Total Recall, and now we are getting the trailer for trailer treatment for The Expendables 2, the action-filled testosterone-fueled sequel to the 2010 hit film.

The video (which you can check out below) starts off with actor Terry Crews shouting at you like some burley boot camp leader trying to motivate you to do those five extra pushups you can never do. He introduces a very short, but explosive clip that doesn’t reveal much or tell us anything about the movie itself. It’s perhaps the least effective teaser for the full trailer I have seen in quite a while.

Not many people know this but Sylvester Stallone‘s 2010 brawny mercenary epic The Expendables was originally shot with the intention of getting a PG-13 rating. Fans of old school action the world over were disheartened but were willing to look past it just as long as Sly delivered the goods, and given the insane amount of heavyweight ass-kicking talent the star/director had assembled for the movie, there was no question he wouldn’t. As the film approached its release date the decision was made to pump some more blood-soaked carnage digitally into the proceedings to get its rating up to an R, despite the nagging stigma that the box office appeal of R-rated action films was dropping off fast each year.

That didn’t prevent The Expendables from becoming one of the surprise hits of that summer, grossing over $100 million in the U.S. and banking a grand worldwide total of over $274 million (with a budget of only $80 million). At that point not only was a sequel inevitable but it was assumed from the beginning that the next Expendables adventure, appropriately titled The Expendables 2, would be from the very beginning designed and executed with the intention of getting that all-important R rating.

But then a funny thing happened to The Expendables 2 on its way to principal photography. A funny thing named Chuck Norris. Continue reading to see how Norris changed the entire course of the movie, and to see a video.