Pop culture at breaking point: Is the multibillion-dollar fan machine about to overheat?

With close to a quarter of a million people swarming San Diego for this weekend’s Comic-Con International, it’s hard to find unhappy faces in a crowd drowning in the sound of applause and the ka-ching of cash registers.

And they’re not alone. What about the quarter of a million happy faces through the doors at New York Comic-Con, or the more than 750,000 at Tokyo’s Comiket, plus the millions more at Comic-Con and non-Comic-Con branded fan conventions worldwide?

San Diego Comic-Con.

Fuelling those spinning turnstiles is a marketing machine designed to keep you strapped to your cinema seat, surfing the user interface of your streaming services and working the cash registers of toy and specialty stores worldwide. All up, it’s a multibillion-dollar machine fuelled by fans.

But how much pop culture is too much pop culture, and at what point does the machinery start to overheat?

This year’s San Diego Comic-Con – the world’s biggest fan convention, held annually, and seen by many as the thermometer for the relationship between Hollywood studios and fans – has held its strong numbers, and has a sold-out, four-day calendar.

But it is noticeably missing some of “the majors”: Star Trek and Doctor Who and retail brands such as Lego, Hasbro and Funko are here, but Star Wars, DC Studios and Marvel Studios are not.

Kevin Feige on stage at Comic-Con.Credit: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Films such as Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps are just out in cinemas, so they do not need Comic-Con’s marketing engine to kick off their campaigns.

But the majors’ absence is also a result of the multitudes of other pop-culture expos that have mushroomed in recent years to now include the Disney-owned fan convention D23 and the Star Wars-themed fan convention Star Wars Celebration, as well as SXSW and France’s Series Mania.

In addition, there is no Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead has slowed, at this point, to a cautious gait. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has a year off.

How deeply that absence is felt by the fandom is as simple and complicated a question as, how long is a piece of string? You wouldn’t think it’s a thing, as this year’s Comic-Con is making all the right commercial noises.

In real terms, it’s about the source of all that noise: the content. Peak TV sold us fewer channels and more streaming platforms – and now there’s more content than ever, and we’re scrambling to keep up.

House of Cards, Stranger Things, Barbie, Strange New Worlds, Andor, Baby Reindeer, The Bear, Adolescence, Euphoria. We loved Sex and the City. We hate And Just Like That. We were tired of DC Studios, but baby we’re back with Superman. We were tired of Marvel, but oh, baby we’re so back with The Fantastic Four.

The Fantastic Four at Comic-Con? Not quite.Credit: Andrew Park/Invision/AP

This appetite has split open the seams of all the silos and social content, TV content and movie content, and an army of YouTubers are now just living in one giant noise machine, in the palm of your hand, and perpetually stuck, it often seems, one iOS update behind everyone else’s.

But there is an upside. “Trash has given us an appetite for art,” wrote the legendary American film critic Pauline Kael, whose genius was confirmed when she was the first to acknowledge that The Empire Strikes Back was indeed the best film, cinematically, of the three original Star Wars films.

In an essay for Harper’s Bazaar, provocatively titled Trash, Art and the Movies, Kael offered this as an explanation for the power of pop culture: “Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption.”

Kael, who died in 2001, did not live through the era of reality TV, of the Kardashians, of the Real Housewives, or a landscape that sometimes places a billion-dollar motion picture and a scrappy YouTube home movie next to each other and, algorithmically speaking, chooses to elevate the latter.

It’s Funko time, baby.

But she understood people, and pop culture. And that understanding gave her a rare insight into why we are all, underneath our hesitation, confidence and I’m-asking-for-a-friend dismissiveness, just a bunch of big fat superfans. That’s what keeps the TV channels transmitting, and the movie theatres open, and Comic-Con in business.

But the problem with our content-powered escape room is that the seams are beginning to split under the strain. In space, you may not be able to hear anyone scream, but sometimes the roar is so loud you can’t hear yourself think.

To some extent, that explains the rise of digital detoxes, and phrases such as “conscious unplugging”. That’s why some people are drifting into slow living, and shopping for “dumb phones”, which don’t have apps, or easy texting capabilities, but rather depend on you dialling a number and having a real conversation.

So, what does all of this mean for the world’s trillion-dollar fan business? Nobody is going to stop buying Funko Pops tomorrow, and The Big Switch-Off is never going to be a real thing. But it does mean that the system, overheated by both money, marketing and brand exhaustion, can run too hot, and when it needs to, let off steam.

Holy LEGO Batman! Will Arnett at Comic-Con.Credit: Christy Radecic/Invision

But there is also a natural upside. With Superman and The Fantastic Four not stopping at Comic-Con’s Hall H on their global whistle-stop PR tours, space has opened up for all manner of things, from the indefatigable enfant terrible of animation, South Park, to the appropriately titled Dexter: Resurrection.

And at the weekend, the granddaddy of it all, filmmaker George Lucas, is coming to Comic-Con, not to sell a Star Wars movie, or indeed to sell an action figure, Death Star play set or poster. He’s coming to talk about a museum: the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts.

So Star Wars came to Comic-Con after all. And mercy save us, somebody might just stop long enough to have a conversation.