This Is the Year Comic-Con Bounces Back
What often gets lost in the hoopla around Comic-Con is that it’s run by a nonprofit. It’s important to organizers that the event do well so that, frankly, they can do more events, but it doesn’t need to make money, and as long as fans are pleased—whether by Hall H panels or just picking up a Todd McFarlane autograph—the show is a success. Comic-Con International, the organization behind Comic-Con, went into 2020 with roughly $25 million in reserves, and that money got them through the lean years. Perhaps even less than the studios, the organization could use a hit, Salkowitz notes, but it may not need it. Going into this year, organizers were “looking forward to having a normal year—normal being relative, of course,” says David Glanzer, Comic-Con’s chief communications and strategy officer. I’d asked him whether organizers were looking to make a bigger splash this year to recover from a couple of wobbly years at the start of the decade—a notion he pushed back on. The event features some 2,000 hours of programming, he …
