Another San Diego Comic-Con come and gone. But... did you even notice?
SDCC was instead the virtual “Comic-Con @ Home” for a second year in a row—due to the ongoing global pandemic of course. We were fairly critical about how it all played out last year but gave the con team lot of credit considering how fast the annual entertainment convention needed to adapt. But after a whole year and several other more engaging virtual cons—New York Comic Con, DC Fandome, and even a Walt Disney investors call—SDCC was a bust once more.
We spoke to the organizers prior to the show and we didn’t get the impression they were planning for that much more than last year. We thought (and hoped) the non-profit would at least take advantage of YouTube’s “premiere” option to make things feel more lively. It did not. SDCC’s communications and strategy officer, David Glanzer, told us the con didn’t have the resources to do true livestreamed panels but, again, this meant that everything was pre-recorded way in advance... which also meant having a breaking news aspect was basically out of the question. Even today you could see some news dropping that absolutely would have been part of an in-person con—a new Exorcist trilogy, a live-action Pokémon show on Netflix—had it existed.
Besides the lackluster (and often late) drop of panels, fans seemed overall disengaged with the weekend event. Regardless of whether or not you watched, there really was a great deal of footage and news, and seeing as how it’s become harder to find what you want on our site as of late, we’ve gone ahead and collected all of our SDCC 2021 articles in this (brief) slideshow for you.
