We Won! (Kinda) Comic-Con Moves Avatar Panel After Twilight Madness

Last night I wrote an editorial titled Will Twilight Ruin Comic-Con, which basically shed light on a potential situation which would cause thousands of convention-goers to miss out on the most anticipated panels of Comic-Con 2009. Last year Twilighters began lining up at 3-4pm the previous day for the next day's panels in Hall H. This caused thousands of convention attendees to miss out on the 20th Century Fox panel which preceded the Summit presentation. It also resulted in a lot of the people who showed up reasonably early (or some people who have never attended comic-con might consider unreasonably early), a few hours, to be stuck in seats at the back of the hall. Either way, I argued that the potential disaster could be prevented by holding the New Moon panel first, or by clearing the room before the New Moon panel to let in the Twilight line. Both seemed like reasonable solutions.

It appears that Comic-Con has listened to some of the worried conventioneers on Twitter and the blogs and has responded to the situation (kinda). They have moved the James Cameron's Avatar panel to 3:00pm, and moved the Summit (aka New Moon) panel to 1:45pm. This will definitely allow more people to see the highly anticipated Avatar panel, as it is expected that most Twilighters will leave Hall H at the conclusion of the Summit panel (as occurred last year). Unfortunately, the Disney 3D panel still opens the con at 11am, which means many will likely be shut out of seeing Tron 2 and Alice in Wonderland as the Twilighters will be camped out early to hold their seats for the New Moon presentation.

The good news is that Comic-Con doesn't seem to be set in stone. Schedule changes are being made, and hopefully things will continue to get better. I will be making another post with a complete listing of schedule changes, look out for that shortly.