At Marvel Studio’s Comic-Con panel on Saturday, director Taika Waititi answered a question about his upcoming film Thor: Ragnarok with a new spin on an old platitude. “Whatever’s inside that rectangle,” he said, “is all that matters.” Given the way virtual reality swept the pop-culture festival this year, though, he might have been the only person in San Diego who cared about staying inside the frame.

Comic-Con International is only partly about the panels and the show floor; the rest of it, open to the public, comprises a seemingly endless array of fan-pandering setups that the marketing world calls “activations.” This year, fans could tackle a room-escape puzzle set in the world of The Expanse, or have their photos taken with a Snapchat-like filter that turned them into orcs from the Netflix movie Bright. But the longest lines, and the most overheard discussions, were reserved for VR activations. While Waititi sat in Hall H talking about rectangles, people waited for upwards of three and a half hours to break out of that rectangle, to put on a headset for five minutes and freak out while Stranger Things' Demogorgon stalked them through a house.

'The Mummy' Prodigium Strike VR Brian Guido for WIRED

This has been the way of the entertainment world for some time now. Just about every genre show and movie creates some sort of companion VR piece for ancillary marketing purposes; Game of Thrones begat Interstellar, which begat Sleepy Hollow, which begat begeverything begelse. At Comic-Con alone, Stranger Things was joined by VR experiences for Blade Runner 2049, It, The Mummy, the Paranormal Activity franchise, and The Tick—as well as a mixed-reality experience based on FX’s Legion, and some sort of AR thing that involved the Black Eyed Peas. (Why? Not sure. As far as I can tell, it’s the Ed Sheeran Game of Thrones cameo of the VR/AR landscape.)

This is great, right? This is just proof that the appetite for Doing Cool Stuff in Headsets continues to grow, right? And if movie studios are buying in to fund these things, that's even better, right? Couple that with the Comic-Con premiere of the first trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One adaptation—the one that credited Spielberg not as a mere “director,” but as a “cinematic game changer”—and who could resist feeling bullish about VR?