Johnny Depp, rendered almost unrecognisable under grey prosthetics and a tall top hat, stalked through San Diego’s Gaslamp District dispensing the cynical quips of Ebenezer Scrooge. It was a meticulously staged surprise, yet the crowd’s laughter was unrehearsed. The actor, fully inhabiting Dickens’s miser with a cane and a sneer, did not merely return to a major Hollywood role; he blurred the frontier between promotion and street theatre, a living promotional avatar that fans could touch and photograph.

This apparition served as a live-action prologue for Paramount’s ‘Ebenezer’, a dark re-imagining of ‘A Christmas Carol’ directed by Ti West. The film marks Depp’s first lead part for a major studio since his protracted legal battles, and the trailer’s opening line, “It’s good to be back,” carried an unscripted weight. Yet Comic-Con 2026 was as much about fresh empires as personal redemptions. In another hall, the cast of ‘Ramayana’ — led by Ranbir Kapoor and Yash — unveiled their epic adaptation alongside a newly struck $40m global marketing partnership with Sony Pictures. Analysts in Mumbai note the project’s budget ranks among the largest in Indian cinema, a deliberate wager on a growing international appetite for mythic spectacle.

The convention’s perennial gravitational centre, however, remained the Hall H Saturday panel of Marvel Studios, where Kevin Feige was expected to chart the next cinematic phase. That anticipation ran parallel to a more intimate piece of theatre: actor Adria Arjona, pressed on rumours she might inherit the mantle of Wonder Woman, rose from her chair and theatrically edged toward the exit before returning to call DC’s James Gunn “family”. Her evasion — by turns playful and strategic — encapsulated the delicate dance of franchise casting in an era where a single social-media follow can ignite a news cycle.

Elsewhere, the sci-fi legacy of ‘Blade Runner’ was stretched into a new series, ‘Blade Runner 2099’, set fifty years after the last film and starring Michelle Yeoh. Showrunner Silka Luisa described a Los Angeles resurrected by non-human forces, a theme that echoed the convention’s own entanglement of nostalgia and reboot. To observers in European markets, the sheer range of properties — from a Mike Flanagan-helmed ‘Carrie’ series to the 60th-anniversary celebration of ‘Star Trek’ — signalled a maturation of the format, where streamers and international co-productions now set the tempo as much as the traditional studios.

By dusk, the Gaslamp District had absorbed Depp’s spectral Scrooge, replacing him with fresh queues and elaborate cosplayers. But the image that lingered was not that of a reclaimed star, but of a convention floor where a Dickensian miser, an Indian god-king, and a replicant detective briefly shared the same cultural frequency. The only thing more remarkable than the spectacle, perhaps, was the audience’s quiet expectation that it should all feel perfectly natural.