Image Source: Everett Collection
New York Comic Con is kicking off this weekend, promising all things nerdy, scary, goofy, and entertaining. If you plan on joining the fun at the nation’s biggest pop culture convention from Oct. 6 to Oct. 9, be sure to keep looking over your shoulder, because you could have an unexpected run-in with one of Hollywood’s scariest Halloween franchise villains.
NYCC was forced to go entirely virtual in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and was held in a reduced capacity in 2021, so fans should be particularly excited for this year’s festivities. “This year, we’ll be full swing,” ReedPop Marketing Director Fallon Prinzivalli tells POPSUGAR about what fans can expect from this year’s full-scale convention, which they’re expecting 200,000 fans of all different ages and backgrounds to attend.
“There’s just so much pop culture from the time you’re born until you grow up. There are things that just really speak to you,” Prinzivalli says about the full breadth of panels and activations fans will have to choose from at the convention. “Our fans are obsessed with nostalgia, so there is always something. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a new fan or you’re new to the pop culture space or there’s something that you’ve been loving for the past 30 years.”
There are countless nostalgia-causing events fans can enjoy this year. The original star of “Blue’s Clues,” Steve Burns, is holding a separately ticketed event where he’ll have a heartfelt discussion about “What Happened to Steve?” after he left the show; the casts of “Back to the Future” and “Smallville” will hold reunion panels, and Jamie Lee Curtis will pay tribute to 45 years of the Halloween franchise in a conversation moderated by Drew Barrymore.
Speaking of the Halloween franchise, Prinzivalli teases that the slasher’s villain, Michael Myers, will be creeping around the Javits Center throughout the convention. “They might want to find out why he’s exploring the show. There might be a little scavenger hunt in the works for the audience,” she says. And they should also prepare themselves for even more surprises. “You just never know what to expect or what you’re going to see at New York Comic Con. There are surprises around every corner,” she continues. “[In 2015], Mark Ruffalo and Jared Leto wore masks around the show and just were taking pictures with fans because fans wanted to take a picture with that masked character, and later on, they realized who was actually behind the mask. Anything and everything can happen here.”
But you’ll have to be vigilant if you want to be a Michael Myers scavenger-hunt winner since there could be any number of NYCC attendees dressed up as the iconic character. Cosplay will be taken up a notch at this year’s convention thanks to the Cosplay Central Crown Championships. “Cosplay is absolutely one of the hearts of our show. It gives our fans the freedom to express their creativity . . . They get to be anyone that they want to be, and I feel like that’s really incredible,” Prinzivalli says.
Panels for all the buzziest TV shows and movies will also be on-site, from the cast of Netflix’s “Wednesday” to Amazon Prime Video’s “The Wheel of Time” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” There’s plenty of costume inspiration on those shows, to say the least, so to cultivate even more cosplay, this year’s convention will have “workshops where seasoned cosplayers can show newbies how to create their own cosplay” and a cosplay repair station so that “if you snag your cosplay during the show, you can head on to Cosplay Central, and they’ll help you fix it,” Prinzivalli says.
New York Comic Con will take place Oct. 6-9 at New York’s Javits Center. If you’re interested in attending, tickets for Thursday are still available through the NYCC website, while tickets for Friday through Sunday can be purchased through Lyte.
