Comic-Con might be screwed all over again

It’s been a hard couple of years for San Diego Comic-Con, the planet’s premiere event for standing very close to another person while you all stare at the same blurry trailer and Ryan Reynolds does schtick. The pandemic lockdowns, obviously, were disastrous for the convention, which was canceled in 2020 and 2021, before returning, to some reasonable acclaim, last year.

But, hey, here’s a riddle that could potentially impact one of the planet’s biggest nerd gatherings: What’s the point of holding a big fancy Comic-Con if all your big, fancy stars might be on strike by the time it rolls around? That’s the question haunting all the major studios this year, with the potential for a SAG-AFTRA strike causing Disney to basically say “screw it” and opt out of official panels at this year’s Con earlier this week. (So there’s Marvel and Star Wars gone, natch.) Additionally—per Variety—Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, and Netflix have all decided to dip out, too. (Netflix, for instance, just got all the buzz it needed from its own Tudum event last Saturday—so why risk trying to ship Chris Hemsworth off to San Diego?)

The only major studios still holding out some semblance of hope for the con are Paramount, which will be running a panel for its new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie (presumably because animation is easier to fudge with the whole “who needs big stars? issue), and possibly Warner Bros., which would really like to get some kind of fan win after a year of very tepid box office performance for its DC Films superhero properties—especially with two more such movies, Blue Beetle and Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom out later this year. Even that’s in “wait and see,” mode, because, again, there’s no real point in paying for Hall H if Jason Momoa’s too busy striking to come out and rev up the crowd.

All told, it’s a reminder of how vulnerable Comic-Con is to these kinds of forces, as it’s increasingly shifted to being a promotional tool for movie studios that may or may not be in the mood to promote. (See also the disastrous fate that befell video game con E3 in recent years, as the pandemic taught game companies they didn’t really need all that expensive panel space to get people hyped for what’s essentially a glorified trailer roll.) TV will still be at San Diego this year, sort of—Amazon’s trotting some stuff out for The Boys, and its ongoing efforts to remind people that a Wheel Of Time TV show exists—but the film offerings are going to be pretty tepid all around

Maybe someone will do a panel about comic books? Novel, but it just might work.