This year’s San Diego Comic-Con is starting to sound like it’ll be a bit of a ghost town—at least, as far as hypothetically huge blockbuster movies are concerned. Not to cast aspersions or anything, but when the biggest film that the world’s largest movie studios can muster up to pack people in to the Con’s fabled Hall H is a Tron sequel, you know something has gone awry.
The Wrap has a new report looking into the state of this year’s Con, which will see Marvel and DC Studios both deciding not to bother with the Big Room, with the most that James Gunn’s Warner Bros.-backed efforts willing to do is a panel on his soon-to-return TV series Peacemaker. Partly, this is a matter of pure timing: Both studios are releasing their big superhero tentpoles ahead of this year’s SDCC, with Superman coming in two weeks before the Con’s July 24 start date, while Marvel’s Fantastic Four is opening at the same time as the convention itself. Having dispensed with the Four, Marvel genuinely doesn’t seem to have much on tap to offer up as hype bait right now: There’s a new Spider-Man movie out in a year, but Avengers: Doomsday has now been pushed to next fall; better, the thinking seems to be, to save some money and let anticipation grow, rather than drop several hundred thousand dollars to trot the casts out with no new footage to show.
As noted by The Wrap, DC probably could field something exciting for the Con, given that Gunn is sitting on hard drives full of footage of Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl, due out next June. (The movie finished shooting back in May, right around the time it ditched its Woman Of Tomorrow subtitle.) But the studio is apparently holding back, possibly to launch an effort at a different Comic-Con later in the year. (And a little less far out from the movie’s eventual release.)
Honestly, the whole thing can’t help but feel like a symptom of the general wave of diminishing returns that seem to be afflicting superhero films as a whole over the last few years: Marvel had two different films (Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts*) both land in the sub-$500 million box office bracket, which has maybe made Disney a little less eager to pay stars (and their stylists, managers, and other various highly necessary associates) to trek out to San Diego to wave at the crowds. Marvel managed to summon up a bit of that old excitement last year, when it gave Hall H a full-court press that ended in the reveal that Robert Downey Jr. would be returning to the MCU as Doctor Doom, but you can only pull that ripcord so often; as is, it feels like the spectacle of the big superhero Comic-Con appearance is currently going the way of the big superhero movie as a whole.
