Marvel isn't using the Big Room at Comic-Con this year

Fans hoping for another "Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom"-size twist at this year's San Diego Comic-Con are out of luck.

By William Hughes  |  May 30, 2025 | 8:31pm
Photo: Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney
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Marvel isn't using the Big Room at Comic-Con this year
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If you wanted to predict the future of pop culture strictly from the things said and shown in a single room, you could do a lot worse than Comic-Con’s Hall H. The Big Room at the annual convention/global entertainment consortium press conference is where studios go to make their biggest and most ambitious announcements—even if they don’t always work out. (We still think fondly of that time Marvel trotted out Mahershala Ali to promote his just-announced Blade movie… six entire years ago. Whoops!) Marvel made a big splash, for instance, in Hall H last year, culminating in the reveal that Robert Downey Jr. was returning to the MCU to play Doctor Doom. This year, though, the Disney-owned studio is going for a different strategy, which is to say no strategy, because they’re skipping Hall H this year entirely.

This isn’t wholly unprecedented: COVID broke up a couple of big movie promotion patterns, and one of them was the idea that Marvel needed to storm the Con’s biggest room to blow people’s minds every single year. But it is interesting, in light of recent big shifts the company made to its schedule—specifically, the decision to push both Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars back seven months. Among other things, that means there are now two Comic-Cons between now and when Doomsday releases, which, per Deadline, contributed to the call to skip the Hall this year. Consider the franchise to be in an extended hype holding pattern.

Marvel will still be at Comic-Con, of course: SDCC hasn’t posted the 2025 schedule yet, but given that Fantastic Four: First Steps is literally out that weekend (July 24 through 27), we’d be shocked if the film didn’t get some kind of major presence at the convention. (See also Spider-Man: Brand New Day, scheduled for this same window in 2026.) But this won’t be one of those years where Marvel throws out a twist that changes the whole superhero paradigm: They’re presumably saving that juice for 2026 now.

 
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