Shopping Guide
 was held.)
From July 18-21 in San Diego, California, U.S., Comic-Con International (San Diego Comic-Con) was held. The event is America’s largest pop culture event, with more than 300,000 turnstile visitors and more than 130,000 unique visitors attending this year. Due to the sudden expansion of comic-related material in movies and TV shows in recent years, Comic-Con continues to be hugely successful. Even this year, the event was full of the liveliness of the many attendees gathered.
The venue for the event continues to expand as well. Up until this year, Comic-Con has been held at the San Diego Convention Center and at satellite locations in the nearby Hilton and Marriott hotels. This year, Microsoft also sponsored space in the Grand Hyatt hotel in which an Xbox Lounge space was set up. Also, movie screenings and discussion panels were held for the first time at the Lyceum Theater inside the Horton Plaza hotel downtown.
The Xbox Lounge symbolized the growth of the yearly expanding genre of games. Even in the exhibit hall, much of the space was dedicated to game companies, and it was set up to attract people’s attention even more so than previous years. An original space was created by big name game companies like Microsoft, Nintendo, Sega, and Namco Bandai Games.
Discussions were held among special guests on stage and those in attendance at the small Lyceum Theater venue. Among its large advances, it seems there is the aim to make it a space where fans can communicate, which there tends to be a lack of. It will be interesting to see what new changes occur from here on.
Just like most years, what stood out at the venue even more than comics were movies and popular TV dramas. In usual form, much attention was given to sci-fi movies to be released this fall and next year as well as popular TV drama series to air this fall. Among these, the ones that attracted attention contained superhero characters like Superman from the movie Man of Steel that just became a huge hit and Batman from the game Batman: Arkham Origins to be released later this year. Other than superheroes, Enders Game, to be released this October, and Godzilla, to be released next May, both had large-scale pavilions prepared downtown and the presence of both could be felt throughout the event. On the other hand, the presence of Disney was thin outside of a large campaign for the 2012 movie Frankenweenie. In much the same way, Lucasfilms, which was bought out by Disney last year, also didn’t make an impact.
Source: AnimeAnime
