San Diego Comic-Con postpones 2021 in-person event, will go virtual again this summer

Due to COVID, San Diego Comic-Con is going virtual again this year.

Last year's in-person edition of the wildly popular pop-culture convention — which brings more than 135,000 attendees to the San Diego Convention Center annually — was canceled, and this year's has been postponed due to the ongoing pandemic. Instead, there will be a three-day Comic-Con@Home online experience July 23-25.

"While we are buoyed by the rollout of the vaccine and the growing number of individuals being inoculated, it appears that July will still be too early to safely hold an in-person event of the magnitude of Comic-Con," organizers said in a statement published Monday on social media and the Comic-Con website.

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In recent years, Comic-Con has been a summertime mecca for fans as well as movie studios, TV networks and celebrities wanting to promote their biggest projects. Last year's Comic-Con@Home was a smaller-scale affair in July, with virtual panels for the likes of "New Mutants," "Bill & Ted Face the Music" and HBO's "Lovecraft Country."

While a major summer Comic-Con gathering has been punted to 2022, there are early plans to hold a smaller, three-day, in-person convention in San Diego in November.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Comic-Con 2021: San Diego event goes virtual again this summer