WonderCon Is Moving To A Different City, Could Comic-Con Be Next?

This past weekend marked the fourth year of WonderCon in its Anaheim location. After the move from San Francisco back in 2012 the comic convention saw a major growth in turnout, and now, four conventions later it has announced that it needs to move to another city.

Yesterday, the last day of WonderCon 2015 officials confirmed that the comic book convention would not return to Anaheim in 2016. According to Comic Book Movie, the Comic-Con International officials confirmed that the convention would move to Los Angeles Convention Center due to a dissatisfaction with scheduling (falling on Easter weekend proved limiting). Though the move was announced, officials did promise that it was not permanent, and WonderCon could easily return to Anaheim in 2017.

The discussion of comic book convention locations also turned to the biggest of them all, San Diego Comic-Con International (SDCC). Comic-Con international’s current contract with the San Diego Convention Center is only extended to last until year 2016, but the huge spike in attendance has hindered the convention dramatically. Overcrowding has seemingly always been an issue at SDCC, and it is an issue that Comic-Con continues to try and fix. A couple years ago in 2013, the city of San Diego put forth a $520 million proposed expansion of the San Diego Convention Center to try to keep Comic-Con International from moving locations. But while the city hopes to keep SDCC alive, many local businesses did not agree with the plan. Near-by hotels complained that they would see profit loss from prolonged construction on the convention center. And the Comic-Con International officials finally spoke out on the matter, revealing that while they would love to stay in San Diego, if these local business succeed in stopping the construction, they will probably have to at the very least entertain the idea of relocating.

It’s a tough dilemma. There aren’t many convention centers already in existence that could hold such an expanding event over the course of an entire weekend. And, on top of the event space, there needs to be local accommodations for most of the guests, since a large number of them are traveling from all over the world to come to Comic-Con. Ever since rumors of SDCC leaving San Diego began, the idea of moving the convention to Los Angeles Convention Center had been on the forefront. Now it seems that WonderCon could easily be used as a test run to see how a large-scale Comic-Con can do in the City of Angels.