Saturday's cosplay-stravaganza at SDCC 2019

Cons can be unpredictable. Sometimes a guest has to cancel, and other times a surprise guest materializes out of nowhere, but the one thing you can always expect to see at a con (and especially one of this magnitude) is hordes of cosplayers.

On its 50th anniversary, San Diego Comic-Con was predictably going to be swarmed — by heroes, villains, extraterrestrial species, robots, wizards, cartoon characters, and some things that can’t really be explained, only seen. Cosplay trends are almost always predicted by the movies and TV shows and comics whose fandoms were ablaze in the past year. That’s why it was no surprise to run into multiple iterations of Tony Stark, Boba Fett, Spider-Man, and just about any character from Game of Thrones.

Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Far From Home brought on a lot of red spandex. There wasn’t just Spider-Man, whether it was Peter Parker or Miles Morales, but Spider-clans, Spider-babies, Spider-people from different Spider-verses, and other Spider-things. Another popular Avenger was Tony Stark. In an ode to the fallen Iron Man, cosplayers in different versions of his iconic suit were everywhere. There were still other Avengers around, and their arch-nemesis Thanos, but this con goes to Tony.

Game of Thrones cosplay was pretty much a given after this year’s divisive season finale. There were enough Starks, Lannisters, ice zombies, Wildlings, and Daenerys doppelgangers that they could easily have taken over more than seven kingdoms. It’s as if every other blonde wig belonged to another Mother of Dragons.

As always, there were enough Darth Vaders and stormtroopers to terrorize several galaxies (including a Darth fabulous enough to be wearing pink armor and Hello Kitty gloves), but anticipation for The Mandalorian, landing on Earth later this year, has really brought out the Boba Fetts. We don't know exactly what to expect from The Rise of Skywalker yet. Expect to see Sith Troopers and who knows what else from that movie at SDCC 2020.

If you couldn’t make it out to San Diego this time, live vicariously through us with our enormous photo gallery almost as huge as the con itself.