Marvel plans to skip San Diego Comic-Con this year

In July of 2010, a truly seismic moment occurred in the history of, as they put it, “the popular arts.” Marvel’s majordomo Kevin Feige and writer-director Joss Whedon stood before the assembled 6,500 swooning, sweaty nerds to roll out the cast of “The Avengers.” Mark Ruffalo and Jeremy Renner were surprises—if you can remember that far back, Edward Norton was still Bruce Banner/The Incredible Hulk, and Clint Barton/Hawkeye had yet to make his cameo appearance in “Thor.” 

As each of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes took the stage, much like the announcement of the original Mercury 7 astronauts in the film “The Right Stuff,” Whedon, with tears in his eyes, said, “All my life I had a dream, and it was never this good.” The idea of collecting various properties (which, if you remember, were still distributed by different film studios) and bringing them all together for a team-up was unheard of. 

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And it cemented the idea that if you gave a whit about superhero movies, you had to be at San Diego Comic-Con, in their massive Hall H room on Saturday night for the big Marvel presentation.

For years Marvel continued to bring out the big guns (Robert Downey Jr. dancing through the aisles on the way to debut the “Iron Man Three” trailer was a good one) but, as George Harrison once said, all things must pass.

Marvel announced on Tuesday that they were giving the big pep rally a skip this year. The Disney-owned studio recently announced they were hitting the snooze bar on many of their upcoming titles, due in some part to the ongoing WGA strike. Some of the films are only scooching down a few months, like the next “Captain America,” but others still have a cloud of mystery about them as the company takes a wait-and-see policy with the issue of what to do about Jonathan Majors. The actor, who debuted the role of Kang in the financially and critically disappointing “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” and would be the central villain in the next “Avengers” film, was arrested for assault earlier this year. He denies the allegations and has a trial set for August 3. If convicted he could serve a year in jail.

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