The year 2027 is big for Star Wars. It’s the 50th anniversary of the franchise itself. It’ll also bring the first new, original film in the franchise post-Episode IX and will mark the second full year that co-presidents Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan have been running the company. There should be a lot to be excited about. All of which is expected to come to a head at Star Wars Celebration, a big convention taking place in Los Angeles, CA, in early April 2027. Tickets went on sale this past Wednesday, and for many fans, the process of buying them was not a celebration, to say the least.
Tickets went on sale at noon PT and, according to the official social media account, had completely sold out about six hours later. There’s no word on how many tickets were sold, but the Los Angeles Convention Center, where the event will take place, has a capacity of around 70,000. That’s a lot of tickets.
But the selling out wasn’t necessarily the issue. Everyone expected it to sell out. Star Wars Celebration always sells out. Especially when you consider the 2027 event is in the movie capital of the world, Los Angeles. It’s the first time the convention has been back in the United States since 2022. The event also follows the opening of George Lucas’ museum (which is right down the road). Plus, it marks the 50th anniversary of A New Hope, is happening right before the release of Star Wars: Starfighter, and will probably include a glimpse at the future of Star Wars beyond that. We have to imagine this was the most popular, anticipated Star Wars Celebration yet.
No, the issue was the ticket sale itself. Fans on the website when the sale began were randomly put into a place in a queue where their fate was decided by a little stick person walking a long green line (this system, Queue It, is well known to those of us who go after San Diego Comic-Con hotels). The idea is to be fair to everyone with full randomization and to slow down the process so servers don’t crash. However, unlike Ticketmaster or other sites, there’s no number assigned, so you don’t know exactly how long it will take. The site only confirmed that some wait times would be over an hour, which was an understatement. Many experienced wait times closer to five hours, which meant by the time they reached the front of the line, all tickets were already sold out.
There was also the wrinkle that fans were allowed to buy a maximum of 20 tickets each. This, in particular, has been a major sticking point, especially when passes instantly started appearing on ticket resale websites at massively inflated costs. Of course, the fine print on ticket purchases is very clear that “Tickets and/or badges for the event are non-refundable and non-transferable and cannot be reproduced, resold, or upgraded. The unauthorized resale or attempted resale of the Ticket is prohibited and will constitute a forfeiture of the Ticket without compensation.” People always get around that, though. You would have to transfer them because who needs 20 tickets for themselves? And who is to stop you once you have the tickets in hand? At least some fans noticed that unauthorized sales popping up on sites like eBay were being deleted. But that doesn’t make the sting less painful.
We can only speculate on the reasoning behind the 20-ticket limit. Maybe it was to encourage fans to team up to get tickets. Maybe it was a Palpatine-like plan to boost resales. But having personally run into an issue buying tickets for the D23 Expo just a few weeks ago, there’s another potential reason. It may have been in place for people who found full convention passes sold out and needed to buy individual day passes.
To explain, say you’re going with three friends. Four-day tickets are sold out, so you need four tickets for four days of the convention. That’s 16 tickets. A lower ticket limit is not very helpful in that case. In that scenario, you’d be very grateful for the higher ticket limit. But, of course, people take advantage and game the system, and you have to imagine someone could’ve set the limits differently on single-day passes versus four-day passes. (Which wasn’t the case with D23. D23 had a six-ticket limit, and I was in a group of five. So by the time I was able to purchase tickets with a similar system, full passes were sold out, and I was only able to get one-day passes for everyone for one day. By the time a second friend made it through the line, everything else was sold out.)
io9 reached out to Lucasfilm, and a spokesperson confirmed the above reasoning was the main idea behind the ticket limit. It also confirmed that the company in question, Reed Pop, is and will continue to keep an eye on resellers, with reclaimed tickets potentially going to fans who contact them through their customer service teams. This was, indeed, the highest-demand Star Wars Celebration to date.
We’ll have to see what happens in the next year regarding any extra tickets, ticket resales, and more. There will almost certainly be new wrinkles and oversight regarding resellers. But whatever happens, many Star Wars fans who wanted to come to Star Wars Celebration won’t be attending, and it wasn’t for lack of trying.
This article was updated after publication with comment from Lucasfilm.
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