San Diego Comic-Con is always frantic, crowded and so dense with activity that it is impossible to keep track of all of it. That’s what makes it what it is, and why we love it (or hate it) with such intensity. It’s also an incredible balancing act between energy and entropy that seems ready to blow apart at any moment.
The COVID break followed by the year of the actors and writers’ strike felt like a reset to a more sane and sustainable level. Marvel sat out 2025, making the Hall H programming feel a bit underpowered. But a combination of factors pushed this year’s SDCC closer to the breaking point than ever, raising concerns that something has to give.
When mega-events have growing pains. San Diego Comic-Con maxed out the official capacity of the convention center (somewhere between 135,000 and 150,000, depending on who’s counting and how) more than a decade ago. As a result, the Con encouraged offsite attractions to absorb surplus capacity and provide sponsors with more space than was available inside the hall.
This year, a lot of those offsites were missing. Yes, Adult Swim set up by the marina as usual, and the Paramount Lodge drew frenzied crowds in the Gaslamp, but the whole lawn between the Hilton Bayfront and the back of Hall H was vacant: no Alien: Earth walkthrough, no Cartoon Network amusement park, no E-ticket attractions.
That pullback likely reflected the escalating economic crisis in Hollywood, aggravated by unwelcome mergers, studio layoffs, drop-offs in streaming revenues, and smaller marketing budgets. It doesn’t help that the videogame industry appears to also be in a death spiral.
All of that is beyond the control of Comic-Con itself, which can only play the hand it is dealt by exhibitors, studios and sponsors. But the absence of activity outside the convention center ended up having real consequences inside: consequences the organization has been warning about for years as it has begged San Diego to increase the footprint of the convention center, to no avail.
Racing out of the gate. When the doors opened on Preview Night, the crowds flooded into the exhibit hall, as they do, but this year it felt like they just kept coming and coming and coming. Hunger for show exclusives led to some confrontations, including one reported physical altercation, as well as intense jockeying for wristbands and places in line.
That momentum continued into Thursday, as attendees opted to shop and explore the floor despite a full program of panels across the extended SDCC “campus” (which this year included the Marriott, Omni, and San Diego Public Library, with a few unsanctioned events nearby).
Sales of, well, everything, seemed brisk. Collectibles, art, toys, convention exclusives and merchandise all did well according to the exhibitors I talked to.
In a metaphor almost too on-the-nose, SDCC literally began to overheat as the AC in the exhibit hall failed for a couple of hours on Thursday, making things a little stickier than usual. With volunteers managing traffic on the escalators to prevent a repeat of last year’s issues, this felt like an example of plugging up one hole in the aging convention center infrastructure only to see another one open up somewhere else.
Comic-Con springs a leak! Comic-Con felt like it was hissing at the seams, and on Thursday afternoon, it sprung another kind of leak. For reasons still unclear, Comic-Con briefly published the list of winners of the Eisner Awards, a closely-guarded secret meant to be revealed at the long awards ceremony Friday night, on its website. The list was spotted by someone who posted it on Reddit, and word spread fast.
This was, in many ways, a worst-case scenario. The whole drama and suspense of the evening was spoiled. Winners and losers alike couldn’t avoid getting bombarded with messages from well-meaning friends (or others) informing them of the results. Would people show up knowing the outcome? For more than 24 hours, the fate of Comic-Con’s centerpiece event was up in the air.
What happened next was the comics community and Comic-Con at its best. Sponsors had swollen the front of the Bayfront Ballroom from just over 40 tables last year to 50 this year, and very few people sat it out. MCs Phil LaMar and Tom Lennon cracked a few jokes at the top of the ceremony to relieve the tension, and the rest of the evening proceeded as usual: a celebration of creators, publishers, retailers and work that captured our imaginations in the last year.
The Hall H-pocalypse. Nothing quite encapsulates Comic-Con’s balance between frenzied excitement and pure chaos as much as Hall H, the massive ballroom where Hollywood consummates its relationship with fandom in public, multiple times per day, driving media impressions into the stratosphere.
Comic-Con carefully cultivates the mystique of Hall H and its epic lines, chutes, rules and rituals. With Marvel headlining Saturday, the stage was set for a true return to form. But once again, things ran off the rails.
Apparently, the complicated system of wristbands and line placeholders collapsed under a combination of attendees willing to bend the rules and security and volunteers unclear on what the rules were supposed to be. More than 600 people who had been waiting in line for as much as 30 hours were stopped short of the entrance and waited hours more before being told there was no chance they’d get in.
At the annual Comic-Con talkback panel, it seemed that just about everyone who felt screwed over by the situation came to the mike to relate their story and demand accountability from organizers, who absorbed the feedback mostly in silence. Toward the end of the session, one fan asked why a show like New York Comic Con was seemingly able to solve this problem using RFID features embedded in the badges, while SDCC kept facing the same problems year after year, with the same patchwork solutions failing again and again.
The answer turned out to be that the RFID solution requires wi-fi outside the building, a difficult technical problem to solve without a lot of money, and no sponsors were forthcoming to foot the bill. But the outpouring of fan frustration led to an unexpected response from the organizers, as I reported on Monday on Forbes.
“Getting rid of Hall H?” “We turned Hall H into a theatre because the biggest room [in the convention center] is only 4,200,” said David Glanzer, head of Communication and Strategy for SDCC. “We decided to forego the revenue from Hall H to create a bigger theatre… but maybe we need to explore getting rid of Hall H and going back to revenue generating.”
Getting rid of Hall H would certainly solve a bunch of problems, but it would also turn Comic-Con into something fundamentally different than it has been for the past 20 years, and change the relationship between Comic-Con and Hollywood that has defined 21st century popular culture.
In the context of Comic-Con’s long struggles to expand the convention center and pry loose more discounted room blocks from nearby hotels, Glanzer’s public musings are probably best understood as a warning shot to the city that, yes, the Con re-signed to be in San Diego through 2030, but without further cooperation, the Comic-Con San Diego might get in those years could end up being something much different, and much less lucrative, than the one that exists today.
Gamesmanship aside, Hall H is a problem that needs fixing, and fixing it will obviously take money.
This year’s show proved that even an event with experienced leadership and a remarkable record of making the impossible look easy has its limits. And physics demands that this much pressure demands a release. Either the container gets bigger, the contents get smaller, or the whole thing explodes.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Rob Salkowitz (Bluesky @robsalk) is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, a two-time Eisner Award nominee, and a proud longtime contributor to Eisner-nominated ICv2.
Source: ICv2
