At Comic-Con, Small Tribes Rule

Fans Follow Their Passions at Convention

Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Summit Entertainment

Hailee Steinfeld and Harrison Ford, who star in “Ender’s Game,” at this year’s Comic-Con.

SAN DIEGO â€" As the pop culture jamboree known as Comic-Con got under way on Thursday, there was an unusual sight outside the 6,500-person hall that in recent years has served as the convention’s movie epicenter.

The actor Jack Black in San Diego at this year’s Comic-Con. He is an executive producer of the Internet show “Ghost Ghirls.”

It wasn’t the nearly nude man with white and black body paint wearing a fearsome skull headdress and carrying a staff. That passes for normal here. What was startling was the lack of a defined crowd: the rows of the film studios’ white tents that were supposed to shade swarms of fans waiting to get into Hall H were ... empty.

After nearly a decade in the service of the major film studios and their blockbusters, Comic-Con appears on the verge of a next iteration. Smaller knots of fantasy, science-fiction and animation aficionados â€" at least as the 2013 convention got under way on Thursday and Friday â€" were stealing energy from the vast Hall H movie promotions that had become the convention’s defining events.

Instead of sweating in lines to see a couple of film clips and grab a glimpse of a star, fans were following their passions into the convention’s nooks and crannies that were offering a deeper level of engagement than the often banal presentations by big studios.

“People came here for an Internet show?” Jack Black said inside the Indigo Ballroom at an adjacent hotel, marveling at the hundreds who had turned up for a look at “Ghost Ghirls,” a Yahoo-distributed comedy of which he is an executive producer.

The ballroom crowd of roughly 1,500 roared as Mr. Black did battle with a wobbly, inaudible on-screen ghost, played by Jason Ritter, and promised to protect a couple of deliberately dizzy blondes, Amanda Lund and Maria Blasucci, who play clueless ghost busters in the new Web series. Meanwhile, Thursday’s lone major movie presentation, staged by Summit Entertainment to promote two science-fiction films, “Divergent” and “Ender’s Game,” was at times tense.

“I am never coming back here again,” muttered Harrison Ford, an “Ender’s Game” headliner, from his seat onstage. He looked only half joking as he became increasingly impatient with inane, prepackaged questions from the crowd â€" the Hall H studio presentations operate under rules that bar impolite queries â€" and the banter of an all-about-me moderator, the comedian Chris Hardwick.

(There was one meaningful question: A fan asked whether the author of the “Ender’s Game” novel, Orson Scott Card, had much involvement with the film, referring to a controversy over Mr. Card’s much-discussed opposition to same-sex marriage; Roberto Orci, one of the film’s producers, said the filmmakers had chosen to use the debate as “an opportunity” to show their own support for gay causes.)

Since about 2003, when media fragmentation started to speed up with the explosion of blogging and the arrival of Myspace, Hollywood has pushed Comic-Con as a crucial opportunity to directly engage its core customers. The goal is to create a buzz that spreads and gives movies and television shows a running start, particularly on social media. With overall attendance here expected to reach about 140,000 there was certainly plenty of opportunity to spread the word.

“Our business is about red carpets and stanchions a lot of the time,” said Lisa Gregorian, the chief marketing officer of Warner Brothers Television, “but we strongly believe â€" in the age of social media â€" that we need to also go directly to the fans and make them feel really special.”

Ms. Gregorian is true to her word; this year, her team is offering screenings, panels and autograph signings for 17 Warner-produced shows, including “The Vampire Diaries,” “Revolution” and “The Big Bang Theory.”

But many of her studio counterparts, particularly on the movie side of the industry, only pay lip service to fan engagement here, relying on dull dais chitchat to stir excitement. “There’s nothing all that engaging about those panels anymore,” said Anna Martinez, an attendee wearing pink fairy wings, of the Hall H presentations.

In other words, the old standoffish Hollywood attitude â€" just show up and go through the motions â€" no longer washes. Over the first two days of this four-day gathering, fans instead seemed to be demanding more close-up-and-personal experiences, like the “Godzilla Encounter,” a lavish walk-through experience that Legendary Entertainment had built in a nearby warehouse.

Replete with actors in gas masks and biohazard suits, a destroyed Tokyo street scene and a vibrating floor, the theme park-style attraction created a social networking thunderclap for the company’s “Godzilla” remake, which arrives next spring. “Ever since stepping inside and walking through the experience, all I’ve wanted to do is tell everyone about this place,” wrote Alex Billington on FirstShowing.net.

Attendees also fragmented into smaller sessions on topical matters, like “The Anatomy of Superhero Film Music,” where composers for movies like “Iron Man 2” and “The Wolverine” laid themselves unusually bare in a frank discussion about their sometimes second-class status; attendees ate it up. On Friday afternoon, the Casting Society of America turned up here for the first time to give behind-the-scenes insights into how movies like “X-Men: Days of Future Past” are assembled.

One of the hottest tickets on Friday was for “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” a coming ABC drama. The network opted to hold the gathering not in cavernous Hall H, but in an upstairs ballroom with half the capacity. The standard movie panels will return here in a cluster on Saturday, with Lionsgate staging a presentation for “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” Marvel trotting out its “Thor” and “Captain America” stars, and Warner Brothers and Legendary throwing a little “Godzilla” and “Man of Steel” red meat to the crowd.

Some or all of those presentations could recapture Hall H’s movie heat. By Friday morning, the throngs had returned to Hall H, outside of which hundreds had slept in line overnight. But many had actually come to see what they, and not Hollywood, had wrought.

That was certainly the case with the presentation for “Veronica Mars,” a major attraction on Friday. More than 90,000 fans had invested over $5.7 million in a Kickstarter campaign to finance the film â€" it is based on a television series that was canceled by the CW network in 2007 â€" and a fair number of those were most likely in the crowd that showed up to get a first look at scenes from the movie.

“You said you’d even pay for it,” read a crawl across the trailer for a picture that has become a poster-child for fan engagement.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 20, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: At Comic-Con, Small Tribes Rule .