Five Takeaways From Lucca Comics and Games, Europe’s Largest Comic-Con: ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Percy Jackson’ Fandoms Are Alive and Well, As Are Cosplayers — SkimNews
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- Lucca Comics and Games marked its 60th anniversary with roughly 80,000 ticket-paying fans per day from Oct. 28 to Nov. 1, hosting creators, actors, authors, showrunners, animators and game players across the Tuscan city.
- Harry Potter’s HBO pavilion drew early-morning queues around its Lucca booth, offering props, House temporary tattoos and filmed messages from John Lithgow and Nick Frost; no cast appeared and no footage screened before the show’s Christmas Day release.
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians featured cast members Walker Scobell, Leah Sava Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri, along with showrunners Jonathan E. Steinberg and Dan Shotz, greeting more than 8,000 fans in Camp Halfblood colors from a terrace overlooking Piazza della Magione.
- Blue Lock received the European premiere of its live-action film, a faithful adaptation in which an authoritarian regime uses a survival game to select the “most selfish” striker from 300 candidates for Japan’s World Cup campaign.
- Frank Miller returned to Lucca and announced a collaboration with Peach Momoko that will explore and draw inspiration from Japanese horror stories.
- Go Nagai was honored with the “Sun, Heart, and Steel” exhibition, spotlighting “Mazinger Z,” which inaugurated the mecha genre, and “Devilman,” inspired by an illustration from Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”
- Alberto Angela, the Italian author and television personality, led Lucca’s Star Wars parade as a Mandalorian after moving incognito through the crowd, while costumes ranged from “Jurassic Park” and “Leon: the Professional” to Walter White and “Squid Game.”
Why it matters: For studios and creators, Lucca concentrated audience reach and project announcements in one place: about 80,000 ticket-paying fans per day. The sharpest contrast was on-site presentation—the same event gave Harry Potter fans props and messages but no cast or footage, while Percy Jackson’s team greeted 8,000 people in person.
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