San Diego Comic-Con, the largest fan convention in North America, will not be held in person in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers announced on Monday. Instead, the event will take place in practically three days, from 23 to 25 July.
In addition, Comic-Con International, the organization behind the SDCC, is planning a face-to-face convention in San Diego to be held in November 2021.
“Although we are excited about the vaccine launch and the growing number of individuals being inoculated, it looks like July will still be too early to safely hold a face-to-face event of Comic-Con’s magnitude,” organizers said in a demonstration. “While we regret the postponement of the face-to-face Comic-Con, our commitment to this fan community and our celebration of comics and related popular arts endures as an important part of who we are.”
Both participants and exhibitors planning to attend the SDCC in July will have the option to join the November 2021 or July 2022 convention. In their announcement, organizers said details about these plans “will be available”.
It is the second consecutive year that the face-to-face event, which has historically received 130,000 participants per year since the late 2000s, has had to be transferred to the Internet due to the health and safety precautions related to the pandemic. As a nonprofit organization, Comic-Con International – which is also running a virtual version of WonderCon, its annual fan convention held in Anaheim, California, in March – is not as pocketed as the big studios. In Monday’s announcement, organizers said the postponements and other challenges caused by the pandemic “left us with limited financial resources”, which forced the July virtual convention to be reduced from four to three days.
Prior to Comic-Con @ Home in July 2020, David Glanzer, director of communications and strategy director at Comic-Con Intl., Said Variety that the CCI had a monetary buffer in case one of its fan conventions had to be canceled for a catastrophic reason. “I don’t think we ever thought we would have to cancel two shows,” he said. “It was very, very scary.”
With just a few months to set up a virtual convention, a set of panels that were almost uniformly pre-recorded and a shortage of striking panels from Marvel Studios and DC Films, Comic-Con @ Home hardly had the same impact on their pop culture. face-to-face events. The tweets that mentioned Comic-Con @ Home fell 95% compared to the 2019 live convention, according to data from social media analyst ListenFirst. After five days, the average YouTube views for each panel on the first full day of the convention was just 15,000 per panel.
In contrast, in August, WarnerMedia launched DC FanDome, its own fan event that lasted just 24 hours – and generated 22 million views in 220 countries and territories at that time, according to the studio. This event included first exclusive looks at several highly anticipated DC Films projects, including “Wonder Woman 1984”, “Suicide Squad” and “The Batman”.
The question for SDCC this year is whether the big studios will bring their biggest titles back to the convention, or whether custom branded events like DC FanDome and Disney’s D23 Expo – which has already been postponed a year until 2022 – will be more than the norm.