Every year, I try to wrap up Comic-Con by writing down my overall impression in the form of ten lessons learned, be it from soaring examples or cringe-inducing mistakes. Con this year was a strange mixed bag of emotions for me, who remembers a time when getting into panels did not require getting up at 5 AM and waiting in line for hours. In some ways, this was their worst year since the turn of the century in terms of material and enthusiasm, but in other ways, that may not be a bad thing for those who enjoy the Con experience beyond the footages and star-studded appearances.
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1. Put panels in Hall H based on fan interest, not medium prestige
Those who followed my live reactions on twitter may have noticed that I didn't have a lot to say compared to previous years. The first reason for this is the increasing impossibility to get into the panels I wanted to see. At Comic-Con, they don’t give press any special entrance into the panels—you have to line up like everyone else—unless you square things with each panel’s publicists in advance for very, very limited number of tickets.
The biggest problem was the massive misunderstanding from the Con programmers of what the fans want to see. It was awkward how they put geek-popular television shows like True Blood, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead in Ballroom 20 (4,000 capacity), causing thousands of fans who’ve lined up for hours to be turned away, while their biggest room Hall H (6,500 capacity) was barely full for much of the time because interest was relatively low for movies like Immortals and Arthur Christmas. On the contrary, Hall H was more packed on Sunday when the movie people have left and the room was turned over for TV panels like Doctor Who and Glee.
It’s not a matter of TV being more exciting than movies nowadays—although one can certainly try to argue the case—but about knowing your audience. Considering its notorious rep, Hall H had a lower turnout this year, and it’s because of the stubbornness of trying to please film studios by putting whatever crap they have to sell in Hall H, rather than accommodate seating for fans who went to Con to see the stuff they like.
2. Forced caring is the death knell of Comic-Con
The second reason for my relative silence was the lack on enthusiasm for the panels that I did go see. Comic-Con is not a Hollywood press conference in spirit even though studios have been treating it as such. This is a place where the audience cheered louder for Summer Glau and Peter Dinklage than Charlize Theron and Justin Timberlake. They say that Comic-Con is great because the fans let you know what they think of your stuff honestly by how enthusiastic they sound, so when the moderator of a lukewarm panel begs the audience to cheer and clap for footage shown, it’s annoying for the fans and probably humiliating for the panelists.
It sucks for them and it sucks for us. Comic-Con should be about a middle ground between fan and creator; and in the past, the creators who do show up show genuine enthusiasm either for the material or for the Con experience. Sometimes you can walk the floor and spot Seth Rogen in costume or Sigourney Weaver checking out booths. Sometimes you see a very giddy Robert Downey Jr., almost in character as Tony Stark, come out onstage during a panel and really interact with fans, lapping it up. That’s fun.
In response to the big star-studded panels of past years, now studios are competing with each other to tow out bigger and bigger stars at Comic-Con, forcing actors to show up and promote whatever the hell they have coming out even when they clearly think of it as just another press tour stopover. The Immortals panel was the worst offender, with producers talking up the cast in canned praises and the cast looking apathetic to the whole thing, responding to questions with short, awkward answers. Kellan Lutz non-answered two different questions about his character with the same inane joke about how Poseidon is “the king of wetness, the king of moisture.” Seriously, just email prepared releases to the press, cut a trailer to show between panels and stay out. Don’t waste a whole hour of Con for bullshit.
3. Want to connect with your fans? Just geek out
The 20th Century Fox panel wasn’t bad, exactly, because Ridley Scott (appearing via live satellite feed from the Prometheus set in Iceland) is a fun guy and Damon Lindelof knows how to moderate a Comic-Con panel right, thanks to his past experience conducting the annual LOST panels in Hall H. Still, the 20th Century Fox panel had its own format separate from the norm that felt very official press conferencey, with rotating talents standing to say a few words about the film they’re in, without Q&A with fans, and mostly facing the photographer’s pit next to the stage instead of the audience.
If you come in as a slick Hollywood filmmaker, you’ll likely get an ambivalent reaction. The most fun panels I saw throughout Con were the ones where the director really seemed happy to be there and empathized with the audience about being geeks. Jon Favreau obviously took it the furthest by forcing Paramount to have the big world premiere of Cowboys & Aliens at the Con, to their chagrin, because Favreau believed that it's a movie born, raised and made possible by Comic-Con. “Genre films are the new progressive cinema,” claimed Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn during the FilmDistrict panel. He spent the entire time just lost in a conversation about the craft of film with Guillermo del Toro, geeking out over each other’s work. During the Knights of Badassdom panel, director Joe Lynch acted less like the director of the movie and more like a random fanboy who somehow ended up on the set and had stories to tell. He gushed and gushed about having his “little movie” in Hall H, asked some real LARPers to come onstage, then used a foam sword to lead the crowd into a “Hip, Hip, Huzzah!”
Even Steven Spielberg was the same way at his Tintin panel, talking about how great we all are for being science-fiction geeks and clinging to our adolescent fantasies. “I’m still a kid,” he said. “I don’t want to grow up. The day I grow up is the day I stop making movies.”
4. Learn from Andrew Garfield
Take a cue from the new Spidey on how to show some enthusiasm. You’ve probably heard about Garfield’s monologue that opened Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man panel by now, as it quickly showed up all over YouTube after it happened. The day before the panel on Friday, I went to see Captain America, which had the trailer for this movie attached to it. In a theater full of Comic-Con attendees who were there to see a Marvel Comics superhero, a new Spider-Man movie only got a handful of cheers, and someone even yelled out, “But what’s the point?” We love Spidey, but a reboot less than 5 years since the last movie? And then this happened the next day:
Was it a calculated stunt? Most likely. Was Garfield just playing to the crowd? Possible. Doesn’t matter, though, does it? The fans were eating it up, because what Garfield was saying sounds so familiar to that crowd. He was showing an example of how cool and how therapeutic geeking out can be. Nothing in that speech is particularly profound or insightful or touching. It’s just a simple statement of one guy’s love for one character—and it completely and totally won over 6,500 people.
5. Got a sequel to a crappy movie? Make sure it’s “fucking your shit up”
Sony did really well this year, because it wasn’t just The Amazing Spider-Man that they managed to turn fans around on. They also brought Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, the reboot/sequel to the unfortunate 2007 movie, and managed to build some decent buzz around it. It’s only a pseudo-sequel because, while Nic Cage is back as Johnny Blaze and the story is set a few years after the origin, it’s a completely standalone movie (note the lack of a “2” in the title) and it’s got an entirely new look and tone. The aim for this one is to make people sort of forget about the 2007 movie, which is a good idea. Too bad it’s got the same star, so that’s probably impossible.
Instead of being boyish and heartfelt like Garfield, the panelists here went the other extreme by compiling some footage to show how different their version of Ghost Rider is. They did everything but call the first movie “for pussies,” first by showing behind-the-scenes video of the Crank guys, Neveldine/Taylor, doing crazy stunts themselves with cameras to get some insane shots. Then they show Ghost Rider’s new look—a charred black skull—as he does some brutal things to a bunch of people like he’s a horror villain, ending with Ghost Rider literally peeing flaming urine out of his skeleton dick. Instead of appealing to the fans, these guys just said: We’re making Ghost Rider a midnight movie punk horrorshow because this is how we see him, and you either get in line or fuck right off.
And people ate it up. It’s probably going to be juvenile and borderline stupid, but all of a sudden, a movie nobody wanted became a topic of conversation at the Con, with twitter exploding with repeats of the tagline shown at the end of the Comic-Con footage: “GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE - FUCKING YOUR SHIT UP IN 3D FEBRUARY 2012.” Now that’s the right movie for Nic Cage to be in.
