Before a single celeb graces the stage of Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, the preview night’s hottest ticket isn’t for any movie at all.

Pop culture collectible company Funko has fans lining up for hours to cop the dozens of limited-edition vinyl figures exclusive to the convention.

“For us, this is the Super Bowl. It’s the World Cup. It’s the Academy Awards. All of our energy throughout the year really gets directed at this moment,” Funko CEO Josh Simon told Page Six Hollywood in a (rare) quiet moment before the show floor opened to the public.

San Diego Comic-Con’s preview night hottest ticket in town every year: Funko.

A limited edition “Movincihawk” from the show “Invincible” had just 100 units.

But once those doors opened, any semblance of quiet was gone – about 100 dedicated collectors sprinted to the booth (as announcements begging attendees not to run blared on the speakers), with hundreds more rule-followers speed-walking behind.

Among the hottest Funko Pop! items on sale were the “Invincible” collection based on the popular Prime Video animated superhero series, with a different figure of varying rarity dropping each day of the con (the rarest, Wednesday’s “Movincihawk,” was limited to just 100 units).

Other popular figures repped characters from titles like “One Piece,” “Persona 5,” “Solo Leveling” and “Baldur’s Gate 3.”

Among the hottest Funko Pop! items on sale were the “Invincible” collection. Courtesy of Funko

As with any limited-run item, there’s a hefty resale market that poses the risk of ruining the fun for real fans. Case in point: that Movincihawk figure, which sold for $60 at Funko’s booth, has already generated a handful of $5,000 listings on eBay.

Several customers were spotted waddling away holding multiple Funko shopping bags full to the brim — which may seem un-noteworthy, until you learn that each comically oversized bag measures over two feet tall (this year’s iterations say “BIG CON BAG”).

One devoted fan even flew from Europe in hopes of scoring a limited edition “Cyberpunk” figure – but he didn’t line up early enough to score one himself. So he took a different route: sporting a t-shirt with a picture of the item reading “I want to buy! Talk to me!” as he hovered near the cash registers, hoping a scalper would skip the internet route and upsell to him directly. “I’ll pay whatever they want,” he told me of the figure (which retailed for $15).

Some Funkos can resell for as much as $5,000. Courtesy of Funko

Fans freak over Funko. Courtesy of Funko

“Our goal is that they all go to fans. We’re not really designing anything with the intent of it becoming purely for the sake of it becoming a resale item,” Simon says, noting that Funko’s official pricing has remained fairly consistent through the years.

“We want people to be able to get it at a reasonably affordable price, and that is very important to us. Over the years, we’ve tried to get better at the different mechanisms we use to get products to fans instead of into the hands of resellers or bots. Sometimes we mess up. Sometimes it works.”

Several customers were spotted holding multiple Funko shopping bags.

The annual confab kicks off officially today.

One such new mechanism to democratize the Funko marketplace is the introduction of Pop! Mystery, a new line of blind box figures making their debut at SDCC through a series of interactive activations themed around “KPop Demon Hunters,” Warner Bros. horror icons, hit manga series “One Piece” and a line of garden-themed original Funko characters.

There are even some extra-coveted one-of-one figures fans can unbox, which Funko will buy back for a whopping $10,000.

“It’s about the fan interaction and the community, and less about creating something blind for blind’s sake – there’s a lot of that happening right now,” Simon says, referring to the mystery box craze that ensued following the runaway popularity of Labubus.

It’s Simon’s hope that the Pop! Mystery line will bring the spirit of San Diego Comic-Con to fans around the world: “Recreating that gamification that typically people would only get at a place like Comic-Con and now bringing it to a worldwide scale is going to be really fun to see.”