Hero Complex: your home for Comic-Con coverage

Like some mutant cousin of the Sundance Film Festival, Comic-Con has outgrown its original mission and its limited geography, which is making life complicated for the movie studios that have been going to San Diego in recent years to dazzle fans with stars and early footage from blockbuster films, sometimes more than a year in advance. Comic-Con is still the place where movie buffs go dressed as Darth Vader and browse acres of rare comics, toys, video games and DVDs. But in this era of people who use the Internet to spread their entertainment passions like apostles, the expo is also the place to spark pop-culture wildfires. ‘Comic-Con has become the single most relevant event for the movie industry now. All you have to do to see that is to look at the films that are successful right now, and it’s all comic-book event movies,’ said Jon Favreau, the director of the hit film ‘Iron Man.’ ‘Last year, before we went to Comic-Con, nobody was talking about ‘Iron Man,’ but by the end of our presentation to those 6,500 fans [in the main hall] they were sending instant messages and writing blog posts, and we instantly had a buzz around the world.’