New York Comic Con News: Excitement is building among science fiction aficionados for the release of Luc Besson’s sci-fi epic Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which is based on the French bande dessine written by Pierre Christain and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mezieres that debuted back in 1967, and had a definite visual impact on Star Wars (for a rundown on the similarities between the Valerian graphic novels and the Star Wars film, check out the Valerian Wikidpedia entry).  Mezieres, who worked with Besson on The Fifth Element, is collaborating on Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which is slated to debut on July 21, 2017. 

 Besson has been publicizing the film at Comic-Con (see “New Images From Valerian”) and now the New York Comic Con, and obviously hopes to do even better with Valerian than with The Fifth Element, which earned the equivalent of $100 million at the North American box office in 1997, but reached an even wider audience on TV and cable.