Comic-Con@Home Failed To Get People Talking

While San Diego Comic-Con is usually one of the hottest tickets of the geek year, with badges tending to sell out within minutes, that interest doesn't seem to have carried over to Comic-Con@Home, this year's virtual event. Variety has crunched the numbers around Comic-Con's virtual panels and social media engagement, and it doesn't look good.

While you might think that opening up the fabled halls of Comic-Con to a wider audience, albeit in virtual form, would drive more traffic, it looks like the convention has suffered from the lack of attendees on the ground.

Figures from social analytics company ListenFirst, as quoted by Variety, show that tweets mentioning Comic-Con were down 95% against the equivalent from 2019's event, with just 93,681 tweets against last year's 1,719,000. Anyone relying on the event to hype their upcoming projects would have been disappointed too. Tweets about the top 10 TV events were down 93%, and tweets about the five biggest movie panels were down by 99%. Ouch.

While the online event didn't have quite as many big-name events as Comic-Con usually has, it wasn't without its big-ticket draws. The live-streamed panels included a Walking Dead panel with many of the main cast, a Star Trek Universe panel with sneak peeks of both Star Trek Discovery and new animated show Star Trek: Lower Decks, and even a whole panel with Charlize Theron talking about how she became such a badass.

As Variety points out, the online format removes some of the magic of the in-person event by removing any chance for fans to interact with their favorite creators. All the panels were pre-recorded with no room for audience feedback, while even comments are turned off on the YouTube videos of the panels.

While it's great that the world still had some version of Comic-Con in a year when most events have been outright cancelled, Comic-Con@Home proves just how hard it is to capture the magic of an in-person event.