Each year, at the end of its weekend in downtown Los Angeles, the people who run Los Angeles Comic Con ask fans what guests they’d like to see at the convention the following years, says Chris DeMoulin, the CEO and general manager of L.A. Comic Con.
And each year, a handful of the same names show up, he says.
“There are a couple of people who are around the top five list of guests that that people have mentioned, either individually by name or properties,” DeMoulin says. “And Michael J. Fox and ‘Back to the Future’ are ones that have come up again and again.
“We happen to just have a conversation with his convention agent recently, and he doesn’t do a whole lot of conventions anymore, but he had some availability,” he says. “And we said, ‘My God, we would love to have him. Our fans would love to see him. And then we were like, ‘Well, and if he can come, I think Lea Thompson lives in L.A., and I’m not sure where Christopher Lloyd is. Can we get everybody?’”
Fox’s agent made some calls and reported back: Fox, who played Marty McFly, Christopher Lloyd, who played Doc Brown, Lea Thompson, who played Marty’s mother Lorraine McFly, and Thomas F. Wilson, who played the bully Biff Tannen, all, in fact were available the weekend of Oct. 4-6 when L.A. Comic Con will take place this year.
“So we said, ‘Wow, it would be our honor and privilege to be able to have them,’ ” DeMoulin says. “We jumped in with both feet.”
Fox, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991, only does a handful of conventions each year, so getting him with his castmates is a coup for the annual gathering that fills a good part of the Los Angeles Convention Center each year.
The four actors will be at L.A. Comic-Con on Friday, Oct. 4 and Saturday, Oct. 5. A panel discussion will be held in a meeting room at the convention center that holds about 1,000 people, but will also be simulcast on the jumbotron screens of the convention’s main stage, which unlike other conventions, is located in the middle of the main exhibition hall.
“It was pretty amazing last year,” DeMoulin says of the simulcast on the jumbotron of a panel with the four actors who played hobbits in “Lord of the Rings,” Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, and Billy Boyd. “We had 10,000 people, like filling half the hall in concentric circles out from the stage.
“One thing you got to love about nerds is we’re so polite,” he says, laughing. “There was no pushing or shoving, and everybody just was there and laughing and smiling.”
Fox, Lloyd, Thompson and Wilson will also be signing autographs and taking photographs with fans at different points on Friday and Saturday of the L.A. Comic Con weekend.
“They’ll be doing autographs and photographs individually, but they’ll also be doing cast photographs,” DeMoulin says. “Which I think for a lot of people, getting either one with, you know, Marty and Doc, or getting one with all four of them for the whole cast will be a ton of fun. So we’ll have that scheduled and people will be to plan in advance to buy those.”
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Fox made public his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease in 1998, and since then has worked tirelessly as an advocate to find a cure for the disease. DeMoulin says that to honor that work L.A. Comic Con has chosen the Michael J. Fox Foundation as its honorary charity this year.
Other guests already announced for L.A. Comic Con include Ewan McGregor, who has played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars universe, Giancarlo Esposito from shows such as “The Mandalorian” and “Breaking Bad,” Christina Ricci from “The Adamms Family,” “Casper,” and “Yellowjackets,” and voice actor Tara Strong, who has voiced main characters in such animated series as “The Fairly OddParents,” “Teen Titans,” and “Rugrats.”
Early bird discounts for three-day weekend GA and VIP tickets are available through midnight, Sunday, June 30. For information on tickets and more, go to Comicconla.com.