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Comic-Con Opens This Week, and One Critic Complains That Its Usefulness for Hollywood is Already Diminishing Because the Geeks That Have Always Formed Comic-Con’s Core Are Being Pushed Out By The Cool Kids

Jul 19, 2010  •  Post A Comment

Another sold-out Comic-Con opens this week in San Diego, and Hollywood will be there with its biggest TV and film contingent yet.

But at least one critic laments that the conventions usefulness for Hollywood is already waning, as cool kids are pushing out the geeks that historically have been Comic-Con’s core audience.

In a piece in the Los Angeles Times, film critic Betsy Sharkey asks, "Will mainstream fame destroy Comic-Con? Will the nerds succumb to the narcissism enabled by too much Hollywood love? Will the geek raison d’être be diluted as the films that fill the hallowed halls of the San Diego Convention Center starting Thursday drift further and further from the comic book, sci-fi fanboy core?"

Concludes Sharkey, "The problem, as is so often the case, is that success, unless it’s handled carefully, can spoil, just as power can corrupt. As the Comic-Con throngs went from 50,000 to 100,000, fanboy fanatics were increasingly being replaced — or at least outnumbered — by the fawning multitudes. The "cool" kids started coming in droves as the studios ramped up red carpet rollouts and the star power became blinding.What was once a tight consensus of true believers was becoming a flabby behemoth of mixed opinions that couldn’t be trusted."

2 Comments

  1. Cool Kids? Sorry, these are not cool kids, but wannabe’s and fawners. 5 years ago it was all true male geeks. And it was truly about comics. Now there are almost as many women there and they all are running from hollywood star to holywood star like it is a red carpet event. What was once a great event has become another Hollywood fanfest.

  2. Amazing freakin blog here. I almost cried while reading it!

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