For five days over Labor Day weekend, downtown Atlanta belonged to Ms. Frizzles, Bob Rosses and Mandalorians. Dragon Con celebrated its 40th anniversary with 75,000 attendees, according to organizers, up from the 65,000 who returned in 2022 and well past the record 57,000 of 2013.
Convention co-chair Mandy Collier said the anniversary edition leaned on both ends of its history, bringing back guests from the very first convention in 1987 while booking some of today's most popular names from film, television and books.
Forty years of fandoms under one roof, or five
When a group of Atlanta science-fiction fans launched Dragon Con in 1987, most conventions stuck to a single genre such as comics or gaming. Dragon Con set out to welcome all of them at once, and it is now the largest multigenre pop culture convention in the world, with programming that runs from anime and high fantasy to robotics, plus celebrity panels and an art show.
The convention doesn't fit in a single building. It sprawls across five downtown hotels, including the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, the Hyatt Regency Atlanta and the Hilton Atlanta, and fans move between them over the skybridges that link the towers. The costumed Dragon Con Parade on Peachtree Street pulls in more than 70,000 spectators of its own.
Longtime attendees will tell you the community matters as much as the guest list. In an essay for Atlanta Magazine, Myrydd Wells Walljasper recalled how the Marriott Marquis's geometric carpet, torn out in a 2016 renovation, became a convention mascot: parade marchers calling themselves the Cult of Marriott Carpet now wear the old pattern, and it shows up on Stormtroopers and Deadpools every year.
This year's crowd had its own theme. An annual PBS photo shoot organized by Bradley Spears gathered dozens of cosplayers dressed as Mister Rogers, Bill Nye, Carmen Sandiego, Wishbone, D.W. from Arthur and characters from Reading Rainbow and The Magic School Bus.
A big weekend for Atlanta nonprofits
The convention raised more than $320,000 for its 2026 official charity, Hope Atlanta, which helps people experiencing homelessness find stable housing. Dragon Con has named an Atlanta nonprofit as its official charity every year since 2012, and those gifts now total almost $2.5 million.
A book drive modeled on Dolly Parton's Imagination Library collected more than 5,000 children's books for the Fulton County Library System and the Georgia Public Library Service, which will get them to Georgia families without easy access to a library. LifeSouth's Robert A. Heinlein "Pay It Forward" Blood Drive also set a record, with more than 4,000 donors over the five days.
All of that lands on a downtown that has to absorb the crowd. Our Labor Day transit guide covered how MARTA and the airport prepared for the weekend.
Dragon Con returns to downtown Atlanta over Labor Day weekend 2027, Sept. 2 through Sept. 6.
Original reporting by Allexa Ceballos for GPB News, with additional context from Myrydd Wells Walljasper's essay for Atlanta Magazine. Photo by Eric Lock/GPB.
