The East Coast’s biggest fan convention kicks off its 2026 event Thursday, marking its 20th year celebrating comics, film, TV, games, anime and general “geek” culture out of New York City’s Javits Convention Center. What began as a 33,000-attendee event in 2006 will host 250,000 people over the course of its four-day proceedings this year, with more than 500 creators and 650 exhibitors on the ground.

To celebrate the momentous occasion, New York Comic Con organizer ReedPop has set some big birthday plans: a partnership with fellow New York institution Coney Island, expanded cosplay areas and a reduced-price, after 3 p.m. Thursday ticket that aims to make NYCC (which can be a very pricey experience) more accessible to residents of New York.

As its grown over the past two decades, New York Comic Con’s goal has expanded to maintaining its classic fan experiences while offering new opportunities for professionals in attendance over the past couple years. It’s growth that ReedPop is increasingly mindful of when there’s no longer the ability to acquire a larger physical footprint, as the whole Javits Center is taken over by the con Oct. 8-11.

“Something important to think about is despite that scale, the team is super focused on preserving that feeling of community,” ReedPop’s senior vice president overseeing all consumer events, Marie Browne, tells Variety. “Preserving the community at an event of this scale doesn’t happen by accident. We’ve created dedicated spaces, stages, panels and meetups where people can share passions and find one another since the beginning.”

The show has also progressed from a solely in-person experience to one with main-stage panels that are streamed live for fans around the world via YouTube — a move born out of the COVID-19 pandemic-era virtual cons that has stuck.

Outside of its “foundation” of comics, of course, Browne says New York Comic Con “now really spans the full breadth of pop culture” and “Hollywood has become a major part of the event because geek culture has become mainstream culture.” Highly anticipated panels this year include Marvel Television and Marvel Animation’s Thursday event, “Dungeon Crawler Carl” author Matt Dinniman’s Friday spotlight, Saturday’s “Star Trek” universe deep dive and Sunday’s “NCIS: New York” panel.

“There’s a lot of special things going on in terms of fan events,” Browne says. “We’re having reunions that fans won’t be able to experience anywhere else, like ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine.’ There’ll be time to visit not only Artist Alley but our Writers’ Block programming, which will be expanded this year. So it’s really expanding upon everything we’ve done in the past, and certainly there’s a few other theme things to celebrate the fact that we’re 20 years old this year.”

Browne has been with ReedPop parent company RX for the past 20 years and moved over to the ReedPop team a few months ago to oversee all consumer events. She was part of the team that launched New York Comic Con in 2006 and hired its first employees, so she finds this year’s event “a full circle moment.”

“I never thought I would be here 20 years later, running this great division and I never thought that we would be at 250,000 people and going strong at this point,” Browne says. “I had full faith that it would be successful, but it’s really exceeded all expectations.”

As for the next 20 years, Browne has a few things she can tease — including the potential of expanding programming to Wednesdays, which would make New York Comic Con a five-day event.

“One of the things that we’re teasing a little bit for next year is really exploring if we’ll offer a Wednesday ticket,” Browne says. “I would say that’s still under exploration. Potentially, we would open it up to press and professionals at first — but not to keep it exclusive because we don’t want to do that. We want to make the event more inclusive. If anything, we would be doing it as an experiment to make sure that we’re doing it right. Anything that we add to the event, we’ll test with the fans first to make sure it’s right. And if it’s right for the fans and it’s right for the event, we’ll consider launching it because we have very little room to grow within our existing venues, so we have to figure out how to grow in other ways and most of that will be with probably deeper experiences than a bigger physical footprint.”