A Very Fun SDCC!
I had a fantastic time at San Diego Comic-Con 2024 (my 14th year!). The con went by so quickly, and I’m sad that it’s already over. As always, I’m here to recap my experience in a long post with entirely too many photos. Part of the reason for this post’s length is (Spoiler Alert!) the fact that I had the privilege to attend the Deadpool & Wolverine panel in Hall H!! HUMBLEBRAG x 1,000,000!
TUESDAY
I flew to San Diego early Tuesday morning and arrived around lunchtime. It was a quick Lyft ride to our hotel, the Manchester Grand Hyatt…my favorite con hotel! After Hotelpocalypse screwed us in 2023, we got SUPER lucky this year. Our entire group got rooms at the MGH! Being so close to the convention center and staying at the same hotel as our friends made for a much smoother con.
Fortunately, our room was ready when I checked in. We had a nice view of the bay, the Marriott Marquis, and a bit of the marina and convention center:
John had been in LA, so he and his brother drove down and arrived a couple hours after me. That evening, we ate dinner at the Hyatt lobby bar; we were too tired to venture outside the hotel. After dinner, we headed to the Top of the Hyatt on the 40th floor. Drinks are expensive but tasty…and you’re paying for the view:
If you go at the right time, you’re also paying for the incredible sunset vista:
WEDNESDAY
The next morning, I grabbed a bagel sandwich and cold brew with sweet foam from Spill the Beans, a bagel shop located behind our hotel in Seaport Village. Including tax and tip, my breakfast cost $25! I decided to stick to a regular coffee and bagel with cream cheese from then on. That combo was way more affordable (around $11-12 with tip).
Because we had a lot of conning on the horizon, we didn’t do much during the day on Wednesday. I went to the hotel gym in the afternoon because I knew I wouldn’t exercise once the con began.
We were going to pick up our bags and lanyards, but for some reason they were only allowing folks with a Preview Night badge to do so. An odd change, because in prior years we were able to pick up bags and lanyards on Wednesday, even without Preview Night. There was a lot of strange security stuff this year…I wonder if it had to do with staffing issues.
My brother and my friend K arrived from LA in the afternoon. After they got settled, our group convened and went hunting for a place to grab an early dinner. We ended up at Saint James French Diner, which had good happy hour specials for both food and drink.
After dinner, we did our usual Wednesday night activity: drinks at Altitude Sky Lounge, the Marriott Gaslamp rooftop bar. It has a douchey vibe on nights that don’t attract a heavy con crowd, but the view can’t be beat.
THURSDAY
On Thursday morning, my friend K and I headed to the con to do some exhibit hall wandering. For some reason they weren’t letting people in through the back when the show floor opened. Then a few minutes later we saw staff allowing attendees to scan their badges in on the stairs and head on up. We did so, but then at the top of the stairs a security guard told us we couldn’t enter the building from the back yet and that they weren’t supposed to have let us scan in on the back stairs. Fortunately, a security guard in charge took pity on the few of us who had been let up the stairs and he gave us access to the building.
K and I went straight to the show floor and found a booth where we could buy cute lanyards. We didn’t want to go pick up our bags and lanyards just yet because we had been told by others in our group that it was a shitshow (as are most con-related activities). I bought this very cute Pokemon lanyard for $10 and wore it throughout the con:
The second order of business was to stop by the Yesterdays booth and pick up the 2024 San Diego exclusive t-shirts that I had pre-ordered for us in May. There was virtually no wait to do so, so we got our shirts and went on our merry way. I love this year’s t-shirt design!
The Marvel booth had some costumes displayed that I didn’t understand until later in the day…
I loved this Demodog figurine:
This Nadja with haunted dolly cosplayer crushed it. 10/10, no notes.
The exhibit hall was pretty packed…maybe a little more than usual for a Thursday morning? I don’t know, the con has been wonky over the past few years so it’s hard to say what’s typical anymore.
I didn’t last too long in the exhibit hall…I started to get sensory overload. So I left, and on my way back to the hotel I swung by Sails Pavilion to pick up my bag (Abbott Elementary), lanyard (boring Paramount+ logo), and official pin. The pins are always super cute:
Then I returned to rest in the room before the HUGE event of the day. K and I had both entered the online lottery for Deadpool & Wolverine Hall H panel tickets—this was the first time SDCC had done anything of this sort. To our utter surprise, K received an email prior to the con informing her that she was a lucky recipient of a seat with a plus one!! Hi, it’s me, I’m the plus one.
The email said to line up after 4pm to check in for the 6:30 panel. K went to a panel that afternoon; before I went to meet her for the D&W panel line, I walked along the marina to witness the scene. The offsites were really hopping this year. Abbott Elementary offered a full-on carnival:
Hulu did a huge activation for their animated series:
The IMDb yacht looked fun, but we didn’t end up going at all this year:
The Hilton Bayfront had an awesome What We Do in the Shadows wrap:
I forget which network this was, but they had a bunch of carnival games set up as well:
Shortly after 4pm, I tried to find where to check in for Deadpool & Wolverine. Unsurprisingly, people had begun to line up prior to the appointed time, and the line had already grown long. I followed the line and the volunteers with line break signs. I kept walking and walking…all the way around the Rady Shell behind the convention center. You can see the shell in the second photo of this post—it’s the white curvy structure on the right side, as seen from our hotel room.
The end of the line was literally a mile from the front of the Hall H chutes. For some reason, the line management team was not using the chutes, which forced us to stand out in the hot sun. And I believe Thursday was the hottest day of the con. Fortunately I had brought a hat to help protect me from the hot sun and a mini fan to keep me cool. And the fact that we were by the water was actually a good thing, because we got a breeze off the bay.
Here’s the line curving around the shell, with our hotel towers in the background:
K found me in line after her panel, and as the line grew and grew and we checked Twitter, it became clear that there were a lot of people in line who hadn’t received an email granting them a seat to the panel. Some didn’t know you needed an email confirmation, some thought they might get lucky and be let in, and some thought there was a standby line. There were also children in line, although the email that K received explicitly said that the panel was 18+. Zero staff was working this far back in the line to tell people that they should leave the line if they hadn’t received an email. Literal hot mess.
We stayed put in that spot for probably at least an hour and a half before the line began to move, albeit slowly. As the panel time grew closer we weren’t 100% sure we would even get in, given the length of the line. We did enjoy chatting with our line neighbors, though, and speculated about whether they would screen the entire movie or not. There was nothing listed on the schedule after the panel so we figured there was no reason they wouldn’t show the movie.
Once we crossed the street by the Hilton Bayfront and entered the Hall H chute lawn, the line moved briskly. By then it was after 6:30pm and security was quickly ushering people in. We went through a metal detector but no one checked our bags. We were handed our swag (a hilarious Wolverine popcorn bucket with a bottle of water tucked inside), then headed into the convention center. No one checked to see if we had an email confirmation for the panel, or asked for our names, or anything. Staff even told us that if our badge scanned red instead of green when entering the building, to just go on ahead. Mine scanned red but they let me enter. Con staff had fully given up by that time and were just trying to fill Hall H.
I entered legitimately because I was my friend’s plus one, but the messy-as-hell system tells me that by that point, they were letting in anyone with a badge without checking to see if they were supposed to be there. I know for a fact that some people who received email confirmations for the panel did not get in on account of very bad line management, and I feel SO badly for them. Truly.
Because the panel was FUCKING AWESOME. It was worth every second of the heat and wait and the stress.
K and I got into Hall H just after Kevin Feige, Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, and Shawn Levy had come on stage. The cast and director spoke for a few minutes and then rolled a clip of Leslie Uggams (Blind Al) saying something along the lines of “let’s just watch the damn movie.” The room erupted in cheers, Ryan Reynolds said something about the screening being the worst-kept secret, and the lights went down as staff began passing out bags of popcorn for us to snack on.
I loved every single second of the experience. There is absolutely nothing like watching a movie like Deadpool & Wolverine in a room full of 6,500 fans clapping and cheering and laughing. I won’t spoil anything here, but the movie is chock-full of surprises and cameos, none of which I knew anything about beforehand. It was so much fucking fun and I can’t wait to go see the movie again.
After the movie, the cast came back out onstage and Ryan Reynolds was very emotional. They brought all of the cameos out on stage as well. If you have seen the movie or don’t care about spoilers, you can check it out here.
What an unbelievable treat to be able to attend this screening. We were SO fortunate to be awarded seats to begin with. After the piss-poor line management experience, I feel even luckier that we actually made it into the screening. I think the Deadpool & Wolverine screening is now tied for my number one SDCC experience, the other being when Kansas surprised Hall H with a live performance of “Carry on Wayward Son” at a Supernatural panel in 2017.
The Hall H line is a real b-word, but once you’re inside, H is full of magic.
This is the popcorn bucket (fucket?) that attendees received:
LOL @ what it says on the side:
Did I cut the custom label off of my water bottle and save it? Yes, yes I did.
Tucked inside the popcorn bucket was this cute BFF pin set:
Also? At the end of the panel, Kevin Feige told us to watch the sky over Petco Park around 9:40pm. K and I totally forgot about it and headed straight to Top of the Hyatt to meet friends for drinks. But we saw people up there looking out the windows and remembered what Feige had said. So, we managed to see some of what ended up being an incredible Deadpool & Wolverine drone show! Apparently it looked even better from the ground. I highly recommend watching the full drone show here. The show broke multiple Guinness World Records! Really fucking cool.
FRIDAY
After the total high of the Thursday D&W screening, I took it easy on Friday. I did not have the energy for anything con-related that day. We had early dinner reservations with my nerdy beauty friends at Mothership, so K, my brother and I took a Lyft on up to the restaurant. What a cool place! It’s a galactic-themed restaurant with tiki-style drinks and a mostly vegetarian menu of Asian-inspired food. Everything was really good! I totally forgot to take photos of the food, but my favorites were the noodles and the potatoes.
After dinner, we headed back to the hotel. K and I went up to my friends’ hotel room and we all hung out, gossiped, and drank wine. It was really nice to have some quality hang time with nerdy friends!
SATURDAY
My energy levels were somewhat replenished after taking a day off of con walking and waiting. In the morning, I went downstairs for my usual Spill the Beans breakfast. As I was waiting for my order, Ebon Moss-Bachrach from The Bear and Andor came by and placed an order. I didn’t say anything to him, as it was before 7am and I’m sure he just wanted to get his caffeine and get the hell outta there. I texted John to tell him whom I was waiting next to, and he informed me that he was cast as The Thing in the new Fantastic Four movie. So he was obviously there for the Marvel panel later that day. How cool for him!
Once the exhibit hall opened, K and I met up and headed on in. We spent over an hour wandering, shopping, and people watching. I took lots of photos, which you can see in the slideshow below. Some are from my Saturday wanderings and some are from Sunday.
Once I hit my exhibit hall limit on Saturday morning, I went back to the room to rest. That afternoon, John and I went out wandering together. We decided to check out the scene in the Gaslamp District, because we hadn’t been there since Wednesday night before the con officially kicked into gear. As usual, it was pretty wild:
I recognized these two Terrifier cosplayers that may be the same guys as last year:
This guy was handing out posters for The Crow:
We did a quick walk through the con lobby, made a bathroom pit stop at the Hilton Bayfront, and then walked back to the hotel along the bustling marina.
I rested in the room until it was time to meet up with friends for dinner. One of my beauty group friends was having her birthday dinner at The Fish Market, so I met a couple of the ladies in our lobby and we walked on over to the restaurant. We had a really nice time meeting new folks, chatting at dinner, and celebrating our friend’s birthday. After dinner, I met K and her niece at Top of the Hyatt. John joined us there as well and we closed out our final night of SDCC 2024 there.
SUNDAY
The final day of SDCC is always so sad. But I had had a really wonderful time, so it’s a happysad feeling. I got my usual bagel and coffee, and went down to the lobby mid-morning to say goodbye to K and my brother, who were both taking trains back to LA. A little after that it was time to go downstairs and say goodbye to my beauty group friends, who had a later train to LA.
I rested in the room for awhile because by that time, I was super worn out. I’m not a very energetic person to begin with, and the con really takes it out of me. But I was not going to leave town without one last spin around the exhibit hall.
In the afternoon, John and I headed over to the convention center to wander the exhibit hall. Here’s photo proof that we actually hang out at SDCC together sometimes. 😛
Me and my buddy T-Rex:
Grogu was in the house as well:
Gotta love this Starbucks-drinking Spaceballs cosplay duo:
We had to pose for one last con selfie before heading back to our hotel. I hate saying goodbye to SDCC every year, but now we have SDCC 2025 to look forward to!
All I felt like doing for dinner that evening was grabbing a quesadilla to go from the Hyatt lobby market and eating it in our room. John hung out at the pool for awhile and I had some necessary introvert time. I got to see this lovely sunset glow from the room as I packed that evening:
We left early Monday morning and had a smooth flight back home. I’m still basking in the glow of the Hall H experience from last Thursday. I won’t stop thinking about the D&W screening for some time; the experience will be hard to top.
If you attended SDCC 2024, what were the highlights for you? Did you manage to see D&W in Hall H or did you get screwed by the line? I hope it’s the former, not the latter!
