Fan Expo Philadelphia 2026 Writeup And Gallery, Part 2
Per my usual modus operandi, this, my second article on Fan Expo Philadelphia 2026, will be an editorial-style piece, in which I discuss some potential room for improvement for the event.
I should begin by mentioning that I attended two of the three days of the event — Saturday and Sunday. There were a few personal reasons I did not attend on Friday, but perhaps the biggest reason I skipped going that day was due to the abbreviated show hours. Show floor hours on Friday at Fan Expo was 4-9 p.m. for general attendees, and 2-9 p.m. for fans who purchased multi-day passes, or other premium badge types. While Fan Expo certainly isn’t the only convention to have later start times on Friday of their events, the 4 p.m. start time is about the latest I’ve seen for any major event, which, for some attendees, can make it hard to justify the cost of travelling to the city for the first day of the event. The silver lining to this, however, is that due to the lower attendance on Friday, the lines for celebrity photo ops and autographing are undoubtedly much shorter than on Saturday, so fans interested in those things could have a smoother, faster experience by attending and getting them done on Friday.
When I arrived on Saturday morning, the first thing I noticed was the long line to enter the venue. Upon closer inspection, I saw that there were two separate lines; one for cosplayers with props that needed to be checked, and another for everyone else. While the “everyone else” line moved very quickly, the prop check line wrapped around the building and appeared to be moving at a slow pace. When I passed by the front of that line, I noticed a single table with two staff members manning it. This was clearly not sufficient for the volume of cosplayers in the queue at peak hours on Saturday morning. In the future, it would be beneficial to have more staff members available in that area during that time, to help prevent the bottleneck there.
The show floor was jam-packed on Saturday, as it has been for the past several years. While the volume of attendance at Fan Expo has not risen to the level that they need to utilize the entire venue, I do believe they should be reserving a bit more space for the event than they have been. In the past (although I can’t recall if it was when the event was still under the Wizard World banner), the larger celebrity panels were held in the ballroom located on the upper level of the venue. I believed this worked well, and that the organizers should consider going back to that, rather than holding them in the same hall where the dealer’s room, artist alley, and celebrity autographing and photo op areas are located.
Fan Expo Philadelphia was held concurrently with Fan Expo Denver this year. I noticed some comments by fans posted on social media after the show expressing their disappointment that some celebrities they hoped to meet were not able to be in Philadelphia because they were already booked for the Denver show. Of course, if the shows were held on different dates, that doesn’t mean that all, or any, of the guests at the Denver show would have been booked for Philadelphia (or vice-versa). I’m sure that having two Fan Expo events on the same dates can cause scheduling conflicts and general headaches for the organizers, so hopefully they’ll be able to avoid running two shows on the same weekend in the future.
Overall, Fan Expo Philadelphia seems to be well-run, and most attendees seem to find it to be an enjoyable event. I hope that as the event continues to grow, the organizers plan accordingly so that issues that have become perhaps a minor nuisance during peak hours do not become more major problems during those times, and throughout the event.
Among the cosplayers in this gallery are _brianaa.simone, ki_rivera, mackezuerc, jscosplays_, thepaintedlexy, ultimate_form_cosplay, ultimate_spiderham, gctcosplays, mamaccosplays, mizubimayhem, starlightgoddess_cosplay, rufio_cosplay, kenneth_pereira, mimidoescosplay, static_void_cosplay, hushcosplays, and many more.
We use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and will post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This will allow us to give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.
To view the entire gallery, just click on the image below. If you are pictured in any of our galleries, feel free to download the images and use them non-commercially on social media, with appropriate credit.
If you like our work and want to show your appreciation, feel free to tip us at Ko-fi or become a patron on Patreon.
