The annual pop culture phenomenon known as San Diego Comic Con made its return to downtown San Diego for its 49th year. Attendees of SDCC have come to anticipate the big movies, TV and comic presence at possibly the biggest promotional event of the year for all three of the industries, as 130,000 geeks, nerds and die hard fans descended on the San Diego Convention Center.


This year was different, however. While television probably had its best year, with the further embrace of comic book heroes hitting the airwaves, with the likes of Arrow, Flash, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and many others, movies had probably its smallest presence at SDCC in a long while.


Saturday is the big day for San Diego Comic Con. In the annual talk back discussion held by the President of Comic Con at the end of each convention, John Rogers stated that all the big studios have consistently focused on "Saturday, Saturday, Saturday." As evidence of this, both Warner Bros. and Marvel held their panels on Saturday and made a big splash, bringing in A-list movie stars, and announcing their biggest projects over the next several years.


The day started with a roll out of all the directors for WB's upcoming big budget superhero films, including the directors of Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman, and Justice League. The Justice League cast also made their own appearance on stage as a group.


Marvel made its big return this year as well, having skipped out last year, their hope was to bring the biggest possible presentation that they could. Each of their panels consisted of the stars of their upcoming films, starting off with Black Panther, bringing out Chadwick Boseman and Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong'o, among others, and continued with Doctor Strange and the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton and Mads Mikkelsen. They concluded their panel by bringing out the cast of the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, including Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Karen Gillan, among others, including Michael Rooker in full costume.


Aside from those two panels, this year was fairly light on the movie presence, with only a select handful of other studios bringing one or two of their larger projects, such as Dreamworks Animation with Trolls, who brought out Justin Timberlake for his first ever Comic Con appearance, as well as Boss Baby and Alec Baldwin for his first appearance at SDCC as well.


Game of Thrones and the Walking Dead also made their presence known in the hallowed Hall H, although the former brought many of their secondary cast, rather than their main performers.


All in all, this year's SDCC was fairly solid, and will hopefully be even bigger next year.

You can find photos from this year's SDCC here: https://flic.kr/s/aHskAgQhRe