Marvel Studios and DC Studios both skipped this year's San Diego Comic-Con, but it was only last summer that Kevin Feige stole the show with a splashy panel that saw Robert Downey Jr. announced as the Multiverse Saga's Doctor Doom.
Earlier this month, Marvel Television brought everything from Daredevil: Born Again to VisionQuest to New York Comic Con, but DC Studios has thus far been absent from all these events.
Sitting down with New Rockstars, Gunn explained why DC Studios has yet to make its mark on a major convention. "I think it's a case-by-case basis," he noted. "It just depends on the situation. Sometimes you really benefit from going to Comic Con and spending millions of dollars and selling an idea, especially when you have a great trailer."
"But other times, I post a picture of the cover of the screenplay on Instagram for zero dollars, and it is equally effective; it gets just as much press," the Man of Tomorrow director continued. "So you have to kind of always ask yourself, 'What is it that's worth spending money on?'"
"The hard thing for me is I just don't have much time," Gunn continued. "I live in Georgia, I'm gonna fly out to Comic-Con for these days that could be spent on doing another draft of 'Man of Tomorrow.' What matters to me at the end of the day is quality."
The effectiveness of events like Comic-Con has been widely debated since COVID shut them down in 2020. Studios can spend millions of dollars on splashy Hall H presentations, and while the announcements and trailers dominate the news cycle for a day or so, whether they add anything to box office totals in the long run is less clear.
The fact is, people attending Comic-Con are buying a ticket for a new superhero movie, regardless of whether they've seen a 30-second clip introduced by a few A-list stars. That's why so many major studios are only attending them sporadically, with Disney saving the biggest MCU announcements for its own D23 convention.
The hope among many fans has been that DC Studios might resurrect the DC FanDome concept. The live YouTube event featured movie, TV, and comic book reveals during the pandemic, and gave viewers the chance to get that Comic-Con experience from home.
For now, Gunn seems content with sharing updates on social media and in sporadic meetings with select press, so we'll just have to wait and see when the next big DCU update comes our way.