The Idea of One Long DC FanDome Event Gave Jim Lee Anxiety

JB Augustine |

Sep 21, 2020

The second DC FanDome event (Explore the Multiverse), taking place less than a month after the first, is behind us. Considering all the content thrown at viewers in just one day, it’s pretty clear why the whole thing was broken into two parts with some breathing room in between.

And DC’s Chief Creative Officer and Publisher Jim Lee edified exactly why in an interview with IGN ahead of the star-studded happening’s second weekend. He shared that, while technical aspects were a challenge, the sheer overwhelming amount of content was a bigger concern.

Jim Lee By FanDome

“I’ll just share from my own personal experience, sitting down with the scheduler, the first day we put it out there, and I had seen a lot of this content already, the vast bulk of it,” Lee said.

Picking what he wanted to watch and budgeting his time made him feel anxious and so the event was split in two.

“I still felt very anxious and riddled with anxiety, making the decisions of what to watch given that some of it was linear and would be live-streamed and so you couldn’t miss those elements,” he recounted. “Then trying to squeeze in the other content into a finite period of time, 24 hours.”

Lee then observed squeezing everything viewers want to see into a manageable amount of time would still present an obstacle on 9/12 even with “the splitting of events.” That anxiety was also part of the impetus for making Saturday’s FanDome on-demand.

“So, I think it was primarily that need to accommodate the desire of the fans to engage with as much content as we created, and also allow people the freedom to be able to engage with content on any device, any place,” he said.

Batman-DC-FanDome1

The event was less like a Super Bowl and more customized, “more about choosing your own adventure of what you want to explore, deep diving into the topics that matter the most to you, and really customizing the content that you interact with for that 24 hour period of time to your own taste,” he explained.

Plans for this took months, beginning in the spring, before Comic-Con@Home and “all the other events” Lee knew of. He added the green light came from top WarnerMedia executives “from the highest levels” – CEO Jason Kilar, Warner Bros. CEO Ann Sarnoff, and Pam Lifford, President of WB Consumer Products.

Bringing it all together was a three-and-a-half-month process, if that, and hadn’t been done before. Lee saw that as an advantage “because it allowed us to swing for the fences.”

DC FanDome Explore the Multiverse Logo

“We weren’t hampered or held back by any other previous experiences or expectations,” he said. “We just knew we wanted to deliver top of class, an amazing experience for our fans.”

It took him back to his days building Image Comics as a young entrepreneur. “It really spoke to kind of my entrepreneurial roots, when I got into this business, because we were creating something that didn’t exist, that we hadn’t built before,” said Lee.

DC FanDome: Explore the Multiverse was plagued with technical difficulties when the show started so it began later than 1 pm Eastern. Panels were held for DC TV shows as was one highlighting Jim Lee and his career.

Did you tune in and did you enjoy it? Was it even better the second time? Express yourself and all opinions down below.