San Diego Comic-Con is not “dying,” but it’s fair to ask: Where does the pop-culture mega-event go from here?
As far back as the ’90s, getting into Comic-Con meant lining up for a few hours along the Marina behind the San Diego Convention Center and waiting to buy a ticket. Still, fans could buy their ticket the day of the event, as opposed to having to hover over their laptop, or laptops, months ahead of time in hopes of scoring tickets.
And while the exact moment depends on who you ask, sometime in the early 2000s the event expanded from, well, a comic-book convention with pop culture offerings to a trade show that consumed — and helped rejuvenate — the Gaslamp Quarter.
That period dovetailed with a boom period for movie franchises like Marvel Studios’ once-ubiquitous cinematic universe (the MCU, for short) and Warner Bros. Discovery’s “DCEU” film series adapting DC Comics characters like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and their Justice League cohort.
Going into this year’s event, which has its preview night on Wednesday before officially kicking off Thursday, the San Diego Convention Center Corporation said that it estimates SDCC will generate around $3 million in tax revenues for the city and an overall regional impact of more than $160 million.
According to the corporation, those figures are in line with statistics dating back to 2019 — with the notable exceptions of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began; and 2021, when the convention offered a smaller “special edition” event in the winter. But in the years since COVID-19 protections were scaled back, the floor presence for Marvel’s movie arm and WBD have done the same.
“The last 10 years, Comic-Con has gotten slightly less overwhelming,” said Charlie Jane Anders, who went from covering the convention as a journalist to becoming an author — and now attends the event as a professional. “I think it’s become a little bit less huge. You look at what’s in Hall H; Hall H used to be four days of massive franchises. Now you look at the schedule in Hall H and it looks a little more manageable.”
And more recently films from not only Marvel but other franchises like “Masters of the Universe” and “Supergirl” have underperformed both with critics and at the box office. So does that mean a similar decline will hit the convention?
The consensus we found was, probably not.
Kerry Dixon, editor-in-chief of the SDCC Unofficial Blog, which is unaffiliated with the convention while specializing in covering everything surrounding it, said she has noticed a “changing of the guard” around the convention — people who have taken a year or two off after attending for several years. But as she told Times of San Diego in an email exchange, that has led to new fans taking their place.
“The convention still sold out within around three hours this year, and literally no other comic convention near this size can say that,” she wrote. “So what, it might take four hours to sell out next year? Any convention would LOVE to have that problem.”
Dixon also pointed out that Hollywood has always had a presence at the convention. George Lucas’ “Star Wars” was the subject of a panel that didn’t need a Hall H to fit everybody in. In 2017 the Hollywood Reporter published a retrospective on what it called a “sleepy” presentation at the 1976 event.
From their account, though, that panel did not feature the movie’s stars; instead, two Marvel Comics talents, Howard Chaykin and Roy Thomas, led the discussion previewing the movie before a non-capacity crowd:
“It appears all the small audience saw were a few stills from ‘A New Hope,'” the retrospective read. “Listed on a schedule as a ‘prevue,’ the panel was an hour long and held second to the last event on Thursday night.”
Over time, the influx of acting talent increased. Gathering autographs at the Sails Pavillion is now as much of a con tradition as hitting up panels, even if the effort required by the latter grew alongside SDCC’s popularity.
“I feel like I got a front row seat to Comic-Con at its most popular,” said Anders, who began going to the convention in 2008, and this year will be part of IDW Comics’ panel on Sunday spotlighting its adaptations of the “Star Trek” franchise. She said 2008 was the year she felt it had “arrived in a certain way.”
Longtime comics writer and editor Joseph Illidge also pointed to Comic-Con 2008 — which came on the heels of the release of Marvel’s first MCU entry, “Iron Man” and the same weekend as the release of the Batman adaptation “The Dark Knight” — as the flashpoint for the convention’s growth.
“I remember going in 2008 and I feel like there were banners everywhere,” said Illidge, who is nominated for the comic industry’s top award, an Eisner, for his work on the comic “Noir Is The New Black.”
“I really feel like the introduction of the MCU began the process by which the availability, the accessibility of Comic-Con became a much more complicated proposition,” Illidge said. “And then by the second decade of this century, it was a wrap.”
By 2008, con attendance had steadily grown and was ready to spike, according to convention center statistics. It went from 50,000 attendees in 2000 to 104,000 five years later. From 2005 to 2008 — a year after Marvel first brought “Iron Man” and star Robert Downey Jr. to an SDCC panel — that figure jumped to 126,000 before reaching 130,000 in 2013:
| Year | Attendance | Contracted Room Nights |
| 2000 | 50,000 | 11,550 |
| 2001 | 53,150 | 11,575 |
| 2002 | 63,146 | 11,535 |
| 2003 | 73,000 | 12,447 |
| 2004 | 94,905 | 11,570 |
| 2005 | 104,000 | 13,620 |
| 2006 | 123,000 | 20,320 |
| 2007 | 125,000 | 20,310 |
| 2008 | 126,000 | 20,310 |
| 2009 | 124,000 | 20,310 |
| 2010 | 126,000 | 33,910 |
| 2011 | 126,000 | 60,765 |
| 2012 | 126,000 | 60,765 |
| 2013 | 130,000 | 60,960 |
As the attendance grew, so did the demand for hotel rooms around the Gaslamp — “contracted room nights,” as the venue calls them. That figure went from 11,000 in the early part of the millennium to nearly 61,000 by 2013.
Germain Lussier, senior reporter for the tech and pop culture news site Gizmodo, concedes that it is “a champagne problem” for himself and the rest of the visiting press corps that they have to take their chances in the convention’s online lottery process for hotel rooms and parking even if they don’t have to buy passes to the event. But the demand for accommodations, he said, doesn’t just include traveling attendees.
“You don’t think about it when you’re sitting in Hall H — when [studios] bring out a big star, that big star needs a nice hotel room,” said Lussier, who first started going to the con as a fan in 2006. “Their manager, their publicist, their hairstylist, they all need rooms. They need to get there, and they’re not taking a yellow cab or an Uber.”
Somewhere in the midst of that growth period, SDCC became just “Comic-Con” in the popular consciousness, even as other events like New York Comic Con and Atlanta’s Labor Day weekend staple Dragon Con also flourished in the expanding geek culture landscape.
“There’s a reason why New York is ‘New York Comic-Con,’ and San Diego Comic-Con is just ‘Comic-Con,'” said Lussier, a New York City native. “It is the one that you think of. It is the one that you aspire to go to, that you work the hardest to get to, and that you hope is the most rewarding.”
At this point, Anders said, it is as much social event as media expo.
“I definitely feel like a lot of people go to Comic-Con to hang out,” she said. “You can just walk around the Gaslamp District and see where people have set up these incredibly rich and detailed recreations of sets from movies and TV shows. There’s so much you can go to at Comic-Con that’s exciting. I don’t think people go for a specific franchise. I don’t think that was ever the case.”
At the same time, Marvel’s parent company Disney has opened a new front on the convention landscape: with its D23 and Star Wars Celebrations events, the company created its own venues to attract fans outside of San Diego.
“I think if Marvel Studios started doing their own thing, I think a lot of people would not come to Comic-Con anymore,” Lussier said. “But that would open it up to other people, so I think that’s really cool.”
Comic-Con’s contract with the Convention Center is active at least through next year, but Illidge argued finding a new home could pose more of a problem than the ups and downs of intellectual properties.
“People are creatures of habit,” he said. “If you take something and you move it to another location, you’re definitely going to suffer from audience and attendee attrition. To me something like that — the physical relocation of the con — is a more immediate threat to maintaining attendee numbers than Marvel relatively failing with ‘Avengers: Doomsday.'”
Comic-Con officials did not respond to an interview request.
Convention attendance reached 135,000 in 2017, where it has remained ever since (aside from the Covid-impacted 2020 and 2021 events). But in recent years, Hollywood’s presence has tapered off. Both Dixon and Illidge said the 2023 strikes by the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America played a role.
“We definitely have fewer films and big Hall H studio presentations than we used to, but Hollywood has no money right now,” Dixon said. “It really is a year-by-year situation. Last year felt like a real ‘return to normal.’ for instance, but this year it does feel like some scaled back, likely due to budgets.”
Lussier noted that Warner Bros. will not have spotlight panels for movies coming out after the convention, like the third part of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” trilogy, J.J. Abrams’ 2027 film “The Great Beyond” or the upcoming horror film based on the comic-book villain Clayface scheduled for October.
“They have all these geek movies, and I think they probably just ran the numbers and said, ‘It costs us so much money to throw these panels,'” he said.
Meanwhile, Marvel Studios did not have a presentation at all last year. By comparison when James Gunn was filming the first “Guardians of the Galaxy” film before that movie’s 2014 release, “he cut a trailer when they were still filming and sent it to Comic-Con. It had that kind of sway at that point — during production, people would stop production, bring the people to Comic-Con, and then go back and make the movie.”
Anders said that during her time covering SDCC that she got “got the strong sense that a lot of movie studios were finding that Comic-Con was not that helpful to them.”
She noted that in 2010, Edgar Wright’s film adaptation of the independent comic “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” attracted some buzz after its showcase panel, which was also a surprise free screening. Despite that, it failed to do much at the box office upon release.
Since then, Anders said, her theory is that television shows benefit more from the convention than movies, since they need to sustain loyalty over the long term rather than increasingly brief release windows.
It’s the serious fans, she said, who end up camping out overnight for the chance to get the first look at what their favorite shows have been cooking up.
“If you get them excited, they’re going to talk about it online, energize your fanbase,” she said of those devotees. “It won’t necessarily energize a broader contingent of viewers.”
At this point both Warner Bros. and Marvel are hoping to re-energize fans. “Supergirl,” released this year as a spinoff from Gunn’s “Superman” reboot that made more than $600 million worldwide, has already been categorized as a box-office flop.
At the same time, Illidge said, “These films have activated media deals and merchandise deals that are entirely separate of the box office. We may think ‘Supergirl’ is a failure based on box office receipts. ‘Supergirl’ could be succeeding in ways that you and I are not seeing.”
(Photo by Adrian Childress/Times of San Diego)
But both he and Lussier agree that Marvel — which has reduced its output following mixed results both at the movies since 2019’s “Avengers Endgame” and with its slate of streaming series on Disney+ — is facing pressure with its Saturday night MCU panel, which is expected to deliver major news on the next two Avengers films, “Doomsday” and 2027’s “Secret Wars,” with Downey once again as the lead and selling point up until now.
The studio didn’t even wait until the panel to bring a full trailer for “Doomsday,” set for a Dec. 18 release. It went live on Monday morning.
‘I think in terms of Marvel beyond just Comic-Con, so much is riding on [that panel],” said Lussier, who also anticipated more announcements during the panel. “They have a lot riding on this. I would imagine they’re going to bring it like crazy on Saturday night.”
