This year’s DC FanDome, the online event showcasing all things DC, was an even bigger hit than last year’s, drawing 66 million views, up from 22 million in 2020. While the big draw was undoubtedly the debut of the new Batman trailer, there was a ton of news about other upcoming projects, from the upcoming Netflix Sandman series to a ton of animated projects to new Milestone comics to HBO’s Peacemaker series. You can find all of Team Beat’s coverage right here.
According to Warner Media, DC FanDome was available in 12 languages and over 220 countries. It was trending #1 on Twitter for eight hours in the US, and trended worldwide in 53 countries.
Although FanDome ’21 did not make any WB execs “giddy” like last year’s, it did please WarnerMedia Chair and CEO Ann Sarnoff, who said it exceeded all their expectations in a statement. “We continue to innovate across the company in service of our fans, and I cannot overstate the creativity and hard work that went into this highly curated, global digital event. We gave fans what they wanted — the very best of all things DC — and their engagement and response have been fantastic. We’re as excited as they are to deliver on all the great content DC FanDome highlighted.”
DC also released some online stats that showed engagement was high, via traffic on DC Database pages:
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Young Justice Season 4 (Young Justice: Phantoms +652%, highest single-day pageviews of October 2021. Other top pages include Inhopsitable & Needful, the two episodes that debuted on October 16th)
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The upcoming Injustice Movie (lives on dcmovies.fandom.com )
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Ava Duvernay’s Naomi Show on CW (Naomi was the #1 DC Database page, +4286%)
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Black Adam/Teth Adam (#2 page on the DC Database, +1619%)
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Court of Owls (#3 page on DC Database, the upcoming Gotham Knights game)
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Peacemaker Show (Peacemaker was top page on DC Extended Universe, +582%)
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Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League game (game page on the Arkham City community jumped 1236%)
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The Flash Movie (character’s page was third page on DC Extended Universe community, +542%)
The first FanDome was a welcome respite from pandemic lockdowns, and pushed the edge of what a virtual event could be (and still hasn’t been topped) but the huge surge in viewership for this year is still surprising, considering that the original streamed for 24 hours worldwide.
Among the factors that may have helped: a more focused four and a half hour presentation over one day, instead of two as before. Also you could watch it on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and Twitter, unlike the first one, which was only streaming on the DC FanDome page. While Zoom fatigue is very real, the numbers don’t lie, and fans seemed to like getting a big dose of DC news in one sitting…and there were a lot of projects to get excited about.
Also, there’s just more entertainment coming in more formats, with theaters opening up and production back in swing after last year’s pandemic-stunted schedule.
Will DC FanDome return? Well, that may be up to WB’s new owner, Discovery’s David Zaslav. Certainly, strongly branded standalone promotional events are now the industry standard, from Disney’s bi-annual D23, to Hasbro’s two-day Pulse Con, being held online this weekend. In lieu of in-person showcases like D23 and San Diego Comic-Con, last year Disney held an online Investor’s Day event that previewed a lot of their own news and got a lot of attention.
Going forward, it’s hard to imagine that Warner Brothers Discovery won’t want to showcase its own IP in its own annual flashy event.
I watched the whole thing and since they screen any questions from fans they deliberately said nothing about David Ayer’s offer to make available his approved director’s cut of the first Suicide Squad movie, much less discuss what the differences would be from the release version. I know the director changed the music in the film, among other things. Since he shot a lot more with the Joker than was used, that would be worth discussing, too. But DC has released no official statement in response to David Ayer’s offer.
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