If you're anything like me, you spent this past weekend looking at hundreds of photos of the brave cosplay folks who dressed up like their favorite super heroes for this year's San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC).

And if you're just like me, you spent your time vacillating between amused judgment of their life choices and utter jealousy of their ability to be in San Diego in the first place.

Costumes or not, SDCC is the place to be in July if you are any combination of geek, dweeb, nerd or spaz because of the lasting impact this convention has on pop culture for the rest of the year. For example, big announcements from the major comic book houses of Marvel and DC will soon impact your movie-going life in some pretty major ways.

In big comic book movie news, Marvel Studios rolled out their slated lineup of summer blockbusters that will hopefully maintain the orgiastic frenzy created by this summer's The Avengers. Captain America, Thor and Iron Man all have logos and working titles for their upcoming sequels, so you'll get to see further developments of your favorite three original Avengers (including new armor updates for Iron Man).

From SDCC, we can ascertain that Ben Kingsley is set to star as the ring-bearing megalomaniac, The Mandarin, in Iron Man 3, which is the final film in Robert Downey Jr.'s current contract. The Captain America film is subtitled The Winter Soldier, which implies it will likely involve Cap's resurrected, brainwashed former sidekick, Bucky Barnes.

And the next Thor film, also called The Dark World, will be a grittier Viking-style depiction of Asgard and the Nine Realms by Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor.

The biggest surprise, however, is the announcement of an honest-to-goodness Ant-Man movie for 2014. For those who aren't walking comic book encyclopedias, Ant-Man (gifted scientist Hank Pym) is also one of the founding members of the Avengers, but with the alarmingly underwhelming abilities of shrinking teeny-tiny and rodeo-clowning on the backs of bugs.

How director Edgar Wright is going to make this diminutive hero into a larger-than-life protagonist is beyond my simple reasoning. Then again, I said the same thing about Iron Man before Jon Favreau and Robert Downey, Jr. got attached to the project. Joe Cornish (known for last year's breakout action flick, Attack the Block) helped write the script, which they promise will "kick your ass one inch at a time."

Also surprisingly brave of Marvel is the slated release of Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014. I say brave because this lesser-known team of space aliens includes a genetically-altered talking raccoon and a spooky tree person among its galaxy-spanning ranks. The concept art looks awesome/hysterical, and the necessary CG work will either make this the most amazing movie Marvel has made yet or the most embarrassing.

Over in the DC camp, we already know that The Dark Knight Rises is going to punch everyone in the face with box office records and Chris Nolan's trademarked bad-assery. But fans got a look at the shadowy posters for the upcoming Man of Steel movie that will give a grittier edge to Batman's buddy in the Justice League, Superman. Nolan has a heavy hand in this story reboot as well, and big stars are all over the cast list. Look for the trailers before Dark Knight Rises this Friday.

In other notable movie news, South African director Neill Blomkamp announced the follow-up film to his surprise breakout hit, the Oscar-nominated District 9. His next film, entitled Elysium, is a dystopian tale starring Matt Damon that explores what happens when only the rich can afford to leave the ruined, resource-less Earth.

Guillermo Del Toro got the hard-core geeks giddy with footage from his new film, Pacific Rim, which is being described proudly as "robot porn." The movie, which stars Del Toro regular Ron Perlman and It's Always Sunny... star Charlie Day, is an artfully staged battle royale between giant monsters and state-of-the-art robots manned by humans. But artful.

Oh, and Twilight. Blah blah blah.

And finally, and most exciting to me, Peter Jackson debuted the first 12 minutes of completed footage from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which debuts in December of this year. Of course, fans went nuts and the film looks gorgeous. And, with the story being split in half, there's now twice as much to love.

So, hey, who needs to be at that silly convention anyway? We've got Twitter and the rest of the Internet to give us our news. Now we just have to wait for the days to pass until these films make it to theaters... Just enough time to make next year's Ant-Man costume.