The Most Memorable Moments In Comic-Con History

In 2013, Marvel Studios didn't start their Hall H panel with fresh footage. Instead, they kicked things off with Tom Hiddleston in full Loki costume appearing on stage to bend the crowd to his will. His entrance was dramatically marked by the lights going down, mimicking a technical failure, and Hiddleston's voice rang out from backstage. He delivered a monologue to an adoring crowd of fans who he was able to silence with just a finger pressed to his lips and then rouse into a chorus of his character's name. It was another example of how Marvel's been able to manufacture one-of-a-kind moments with their Comic-Con panels.

After the successes of the X-Men and Spider-Man movies, Marvel properties were doing well in Hollywood, but the publisher had signed away the rights to the characters and had little creative control. That changed in 2007 when director Jon Favreau gave the audience at SDCC not just a look at some rough test footage of his upcoming Iron Man film, but a finished teaser trailer of Marvel's first in-house production.

Hall H's attendees were so blown away by the trailer that they demanded to see it again. Iron Man kicked off Marvel Studios' highly ambitious and lucrative cinematic universe a year later, and it all started with these two-and-a-half minutes of footage.

Two years before Iron Man was released, Marvel Studios held its first panel in front of 2,000 people in a smaller venue compared to the cavernous Hall H. Speaking to Wired in 2012, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige reminisced about sowing the early seeds of the MCU in fans' minds at that panel: 

Jon Favreau was on the panel talking about Iron Man, and Louis Leterrier was talking about The Incredible Hulk, and Edgar Wright was talking about Ant Man. And somebody asked, "Could the characters cross over? Is this person ever going to meet this person?" I was asked, "Are we ever going to see the Avengers on screen?" And I said, "Who knows. This is a big new experiment for Marvel. But it’s no coincidence that we have the rights to Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Cap –" and the whole audience started cheering. That was one of the moments where I went, boy, if only, if only we could actually sort of pull this all together.

In 2010, four years after Kevin Feige first teased the idea of a shared Marvel Cinematic Universe, that tantalizing dream was realized on the stage of Hall H with a surprise reveal during the joint Captain America and Thor panels. With a promise of "one more thing" that has become a regular trick in Comic-Con panels, Samuel L. Jackson came onstage to officially assemble the Avengers for the first time. Fans had grown accustomed to seeing celebrities at SDCC, but the sheer number of comic book dreams coming true in that moment whipped the crowd into a frenzy.

In 2007, there was no Hall H panel for Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins follow-up, The Dark Knight. But, the film's presence was still felt all over the convention in the form of an award-winning viral marketing campaign that is still hailed as one of the best of its kind from Hollywood. 

The campaign sent eager Batman fans on a scavenger hunt around the convention following clues left by a mysterious, clown-faced figure to unlock a teaser trailer online. The campaign continued for another year, generating an unprecedented amount of buzz for the movie's 2008 release without the team behind it even having to show up in the building.

In the summer of 2015, the world was waiting for the winter release of the first new Star Wars film in a decade. The Star Wars SDCC panel that year brought together new stars Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Gwendoline Christie and Domhall Gleeson with original series stars Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. If that wasn't enough for fans of a galaxy far, far away, The Force Awakens director J. J Abrams invited all 6,000 audience members outside the Convention Center afterwards for a concert featuring composer John Williams's classic Star Wars melodies.