James Gunn Finally Explains Why DC Is Skipping Comic-Con Again for the 4th Year in a Row
San Diego Comic-Con has long been the epicenter of superhero movie marketing, the place where studios drop their biggest trailers and reveal casting news to a crowd of tens of thousands of screaming fans packed into Hall H. For years, both Marvel and DC treated the convention as an unmissable stop on their promotional calendar, but that tradition has quietly fallen apart on the DC side of things.
DC has now skipped Hall H for a fourth consecutive year, with the studio’s last movie panel dating all the way back to 2022 for ‘Black Adam’ and ‘Shazam’ sequels. This year, DC is once again sitting out any film presentations, opting only for a smaller panel focused on its Lanterns television series instead.
The explanation traces back to James Gunn himself, who addressed the studio’s absence from major conventions in a conversation with New Rockstars roughly eight months ago. Gunn was blunt about the reasoning, explaining it comes down to a case-by-case cost-benefit analysis rather than any broader shift away from fan engagement.
He said sometimes you really benefit from going to Comic-Con and spending millions of dollars to sell an idea, especially when you have a great trailer, but other times he posts a picture of a screenplay cover on Instagram for zero dollars and it is equally effective, generating just as much press.
Gunn expanded on the financial calculus in the same conversation, framing every promotional decision around a simple question of what is actually worth spending money on. Beyond the dollars involved, he also pointed to a more personal constraint driving his choices. He explained that time is the harder issue for him, since flying out to Comic-Con from Georgia eats into days that could otherwise go toward another draft of ‘Man of Tomorrow,’ adding that quality matters most to him at the end of the day.
That reasoning lines up with a broader industry shift that has been building since 2020, as studios increasingly weigh the value of expensive Hall H presentations against the reach they can get simply by posting directly to social media. Fans hoping for a return to DC’s earlier convention presence have pushed for the studio to bring back FanDome, the digital event format that let DC share global announcements without the costs tied to an in person panel, though no formal revival has been confirmed.
Do you think James Gunn is right to keep DC away from Comic-Con movie panels?
DC’s current slate remains active even without the Comic-Con spotlight, with projects like ‘Man of Tomorrow,’ ‘Supergirl,’ ‘Clayface,’ and ‘Batman: The Brave and the Bold’ all moving forward under Gunn’s direction as DC Studios co-CEO. For now, it looks like Gunn is content letting a well timed Instagram post do the heavy lifting that a Hall H panel once handled, even if that means DC’s fanbase has to wait a little longer for the kind of massive convention reveal moments Marvel still delivers most years.
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