Comic-Con 2015 badges sell out in record speed; sad news for all genre fans
Today was either an exciting or harrowing day depending on who you are. Badges for Comic-Con 2015 in San Diego went on sale starting at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Saturday, but they were all more or less gone by the time that 10:00 rolled around. The organization confirmed that in a post on Twitter. This group once again used a system akin to a lottery to hand out tickets a.k.a. badges, placing potential customers in a waiting room and then randomly selected various consumers around the world to register. When you consider official start and stop times, the convention sold out in the record time of less than an hour.
Of course, it seems to be every year now that there are more upset people than satisfied ones. Maybe this is just an indictment on social media; more are likely to complain over being shut out than celebrate getting tickets, but we’ve heard of people now who have hoped to get tickets for several years running, only to be turned away repeatedly either from server crashes in the past or the current waiting-room system.
So how does this apply to the TV community? We see it as this: We were at Comic-Con last year covering “Hannibal” and to just scope out the cosplay, and it is incredible how much it has become a TV-centered convention as much as anything else. There were countless ads for “Gotham” and “The Blacklist,” and the “Game of Thrones” panel to us is nowadays one of the most popular ones of the entire convention. We anticipate some other shows such as “Arrow,” “Once Upon a Time,” and “Supernatural” having a presence. Luckily, those of you who still want to visit San Diego can still visit some of the other events taking place around the convention, given that there are many that are not officially sanctioned and require no badge.
In case you were wondering what the future of the convention is, it seems as though the convention is committed to stay through 2016. After that, we wonder if there should be other venues considered. Clearly, there is far more of a demand than the current convention center can accommodate, and there is significant money being left on the table by tens of thousands of people who would probably make the trip down if there were more badges.