Fan Expo HQ Is Betting On A Big Comeback For Pop Culture Conventions

Pandemics are bad for a lot of businesses, but companies that make their money assembling large crowds of people in enclosed spaces for days at a time definitely felt the pain the last few years. While many in the space downsized their portfolios and their staffs during the COVID years, Fan Expo HQ, a division of tradeshow giant Informa Connect, went all in. The Canadian-based con organizer added to its existing lineup of comic and fan conventions by acquiring the Denver Pop Culture Con – one of the largest remaining independent shows in North America – in March, 2021, then scooped up the top performing events from longtime fan-con mainstay Wizard World in August.

This weekend, Fan Expo HQ will relaunch its flagship event, Fan Expo Canada, in its home market of Toronto, where upwards of 120,000 attendees are expected in the first full show since the pandemic began. This follows a triumphant return to Orlando in the spring, where the 2022 edition of MegaCon brought in a record crowd of 140,000, and successful events over the summer in Chicago and Boston.

Altogether, Fan Expo hosts nearly a million fans per year, and has added eight new shows to its lineup in 2022, including one in the notoriously costly and hard-to-serve market of San Francisco. According to the company, that’s enough to rank as “the largest comic con producer in the world.” As conventions roar back from their COVID-induced slumber, Fan Expo’s strategy of zigging when others zagged is looking pretty good.

“I wouldn’t say we had a strategy,” says Fan Expo’s colorful and usually media-shy founder and President Aman Gupta. “I was looking for an opportunity to make Fan Expo better. We struck a deal with Pop Culture Classroom to take over the Denver show. At the same time, we’d been trying to get into Moscone Center [in San Francisco] for a while, and Informa helped us get a five year deal. That generated some press, and that’s when I heard from Wizard World.”

Gupta started in the business young. At age 15, he organized his first show, a sports card convention in Toronto, and invited legendary Maple Leafs goalie Johnny Bower as a guest. Bower introduced Gupta to some of his NHL pals, which gave his shows a leg up when the sports card market was super hot in the early 1990s. From there, he moved into comic cons.

“Canada didn’t have a national comic convention, so we started Fan Expo as a way to represent fans here,” said Gupta. In the late 90s, it started branching into comics-adjacent genres like anime, science fiction and horror, reflecting the widening gyre of fan culture.

Gupta says Fan Expo’s goal is to give every genre fan a complete experience, with guests, dealers and programming catering to their specific interests. “If you’re a comic fan, we have comic creators, signings, panels and workshops. If you’re into anime, we have screenings and special guests. Any one of our verticals could be its own standalone show. In fact, we used to market just to those niches, and only consolidated everything into one brochure in the mid 2000s.”

Though Fan Expo’s approach has drawn mixed reviews from purists who prefer more focused events, it has certainly proven popular with the mainstream audiences drawn into geek culture from the avalanche of movies and media.

In 2013, as San Diego Comic-Con was hitting its peak and Reed Exhibitions was striking gold with its ReedPOP fan convention brand, Fan Expo was caught in the updraft. “Around that time, we had a crazy expansion,” Gupta recalls. “I had scaled up a bit, but it was getting difficult. The Toronto show was getting 75-80K attendees, which gave us a lot of exposure and liability. I didn’t have the stomach to deal with the stress.”

Gupta says discussions with ReedPOP ended up falling through, but then Informa came calling. “They put the deal together and it clicked really well,” he said. “I saw their vision and wanted to be part of it.”

With new organizational heft and capital, Fan Expo built some of its shows into international destination events. “Our show in Orlando, MegaCon, surprised us this year with a huge turnout, over 140,000,” he said. The scale nearly overwhelmed the infrastructure in the Florida home of Disney World. They’re expecting big crowds in Toronto this weekend, although Gupta says there is still room to grow in the city and the venue.

One issue for Fan Expo as an international company is navigating customs and border issues for events that feature a lot of exhibitors selling expensive items and celebrities running cash-based photo and autograph sales at the shows. Gupta says Fan Expo provides support for exhibitors to navigate the US-Canada regulations. “We expect everyone to abide by the law: our fans, our talent, everyone,” said Gupta.

As the industry bounces back from the pandemic, Gupta is eying the future, particularly innovations that might affect the fan experience and help evolve fan events from the standard format they’ve been using for the past three or four decades. “We’ve learned a lot from the digital/virtual shows we did in 2020 and 2021,” said Gupta. “We were already looking at ways to integrate digital technology more closely with our shows, and that took a big step forward.”

Gupta pointed to an upcoming collaboration with the live selling platform Whatnot, and to the evolution of legacy Denver and Wizard World shows as they transition to the Fan Expo branding. The company is also looking overseas, with a “sister show” slated for Dubai.

But the near term objective is restoring the entire sector to financial health. “We’re now the largest in the world and we need to act that way,” he said. “We invite everyone to participate. We may be competitive but we have a common goal. We all love this space, we love the fans, and we want events to thrive.”