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While it had certain logistical problems in its execution, there’s no denying that Marvel’s surprise screening of the entire Deadpool and Wolverine movie in Hall H on Thursday evening at San Diego Comic-Con 2024 was a marketing masterstroke — managing to deliver a complete event for the fans lucky enough to be in the room that will be the talk of the next few days of the show… at least until Marvel’s other Hall H panel on Saturday evening.

For those of us with long memories, however, it’s worth noting that this wasn’t the first Hall H panel that included a surprise complete screening of a much-anticipated all-star movie… even if the circumstances were different enough (and the length of time between the two long enough) to make both entirely different things.

Cast your mind back, if you will, to 2010: a year when SDCC was still coming into its powers as a movie marketing must-have, with even Marvel Studios just finding its feet. (For context, 2010 was when Iron Man 2 came out, and the MCU consisted of only three movies… two of them being Iron Man features.) We were all younger and more innocent back then, which was why no-one expected the Hall H panel for Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World —adapting Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series for Oni Press, and featuring a cast including Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and pre-MCU incarnations of both Chris Evans and Brie Larson — to declare midway through that, instead of just talking about the movie, it’d be more fun to just show it to everyone.

Unlike Marvel’s Deadpool and Wolverine, this didn’t mean that everyone stayed in Hall H to watch; instead, the loading bay doors of Hall H opened, and director Edgar Wright led the thousands of fans in the audience up Fourth Avenue to the Balboa Theater, where they became the first public audience to see the movie. This was, after all, taking place on the Thursday of the convention, three weeks ahead of the movie’s release date in theaters. (As someone at the screening, I should add that the live music from Metric helped add to the feeling that this was a thing.) As a move to create buzz for the film at the show, it worked: it was one of the primary talking points of the weekend, with the Balboa holding screenings for the next two nights for fans who weren’t able to be part of that first event.

In the long term, however, experts were mixed about how the move went down. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World underperformed in theaters, making around $50 million internationally in its theatrical release against a budget estimated to be somewhere in the region of $65 million to $85 million, and in the inevitable post-game analysis of what went wrong, preview screenings at shows like SDCC were identified as one problem. After all, had the most hardcore fans and target audience not showed up at the box office because they’d already seen the movie for free, as many suggested…?

This isn’t going to be a concern for Deadpool and Wolverine, of course; that movie is already headed to make records in its opening weekend, and notably was screened at Hall H on an evening when fans not at the event could simply head to theaters to see it for themselves. Not to mention, the third movie in a hit series — and one that connects that series to the wildly successful MCU brand — was always going to be a very different prospect than the one-off adaptation of an indie graphic novel series.

Think of the comparison between the two surprise Hall H screenings as an instructive lesson on how the pop cultural world has changed in the last nearly-15 years, perhaps — or, if you want to look at it a different way, it’s another sign of how Scott Pilgrim led the way for the MCU in an entirely unexpected manner. Does this mean we can finally demand a Michael Cera Wolverine now?

Get a fuller San Diego Comic-Con experience with a full rundown of our SDCC 2024 stories, as well as all the big SDCC 2024 news, how to make the most out of San Diego Comic-Con, and the real burning question: how much does it actually cost to go to SDCC?