San Diego and Comic-Con are like peanut butter and jelly. For pop culture geeks, it's hard to imagine one without the other. Yet it's clear that the mammoth crowds the event annually draws have outgrown the city's capacity since as far back as 2006, maybe longer.
In late 2013, Comic-Con International announced that despite being wooed by other cities like Los Angeles and Anaheim, the convention intended to stay in San Diego. The Convention Center had just announced a plan that would expand its available space by 225,000 square feet, including a new ballroom 20% bigger than the infamous Hall H and new hotel rooms at the adjacent Hilton Bayfront. Thanks to this plan, Comic-Con renewed its contract up through 2016, which was when the expansion was expected to be complete.
The Hollywood Reporter says that a great big wrench has been thrown into the mix. In an unexpected development, the entire expansion plan has been scuttled. There will be no added convention floor space, no new ballroom, nothing. In a nutshell: the expansion was going to be funded by piling new taxes onto local hotel rooms. An appeals court just overturned that tax plan, so the expansion plan is kaput.
So what happens to Comic-Con when you take the expansion out of the equation? The event's organizers now face a monumental decision. Unless the San Diego Convention Center can miraculously secure funding from another source (possible, but not likely), then Comic-Con will have to knowingly continue to overfill the Convention Center, putting massive strains on the entire city... Or it will have to move.
Anaheim or Los Angeles would be thrilled to welcome Comic-Con, since it rakes in around $180,000,000 a year for its host city. L.A., in particular would love to have it, since the many celebrities that turn up to promote their latest work would find it so conveniently located. Either city has the bigger facilities and added hotel rooms needed for the convention. Las Vegas would work well, too; it has loads of convention space and boasts over 62,000 hotel rooms on the Strip alone.
Comic-Con International's planners have reiterated time and again that they have no desire to move the event away from the city that's become a huge part of its identity. But that 2016 deadline is looming, and at the end of the day, numbers don't lie.
Attendees fight mob-sized crowds daily just to get from their hotel room to the Convention Center, not to mention the now overnight wait-in-line that's required to get into the biggest events. Thousands of potential attendees and exhibitors are turned away every year because there's not enough room.
If Comic-Con wants to survive it needs room to grow, and it looks like that's the one thing San Diego can no longer provide.
