This past weekend was Comic-Con, often the biggest event of the year for pop culture news (specifically a superhero / science fiction / fantasy flavor), but this year was a little different. Due to coronavirus, the actual Comic-Con event in San Diego, where people dress up, ignore the existence of the comics and the people who make them, and then wait in lines for hours and hours for them to see Jason Momoa from 50 feet away – was canceled, leaving organizers to set up an online replacement even called Comic-Con @ Home that would have the same star-studded panels and ads but without the need for anyone to get sick.
The problem, of course, was that due to the nature of the event, which was staged in a matter of months and held entirely online, some of the biggest names in Comic-Con news (i.e.Marvel Studios and DC ) they did not attend . Had Some Living Dead stuff and we saw the first two minutes of The new mutants, but the biggest superhero news of the weekend came from some things Zack Snyder said at the JusticeCon event not quite official. (The official replacement for Warner Bros. Comic-Con will be DC FanDome in August)
According to Variety, the response to this online version of Comic-Con was a resounding “meh,” with social media analytics company ListenFirst saying that tweets about Comic-Con fell 95 percent from last year, and conversations about Major television events fell 93 percent and 99 percent less for movie events. YouTube dashboard files don’t even have many views, and ListenFirst notes that comments were disabled in Comic-Con @ Home videos, preventing any of them from having the kind of fan interaction that usually happens at Comic-Con. . Now, it is totally unfair to judge this Comic-Con against a normal Comic-Con, but this lack of interest is interesting compared to the E3 of the video game industry.
E3 was on shaky ground last year, in terms of people who care about it, as no company was ready to say anything about its new consoles, and Sony skipped the event entirely. No E3 this year, video game companies too set up your own online ad eventsand while they It has not always been great, have not been ignored. It could be that fans are used to being able to attend Comic-Con, so some sort of online approach is not what they want, whereas, until recently, E3 was a press-only event, so fans couldn’t attend anyway. Who knows. Either way, hopefully this will all be over by next year’s Comic-Cons and E3s, so it may not matter.
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