Super Bowl Is Big For Film Fans. So Why Did This Year’s Super Bowl Movie Trailers Forget How to Be Movie Trailers?
Super Bowl Sunday has a lot of rights of passage. Eating at least one cream cheese-heavy dip. Rooting for a team that you (most likely) have no investment in the other 364 days of the year. And waiting in anticipation of trailers for a few of the year’s movies.
Admittedly, that anticipation has taken on a life of its own in recent years, to the point where portions of the Internet practically demand for half of the telecast to be dedicated to TV spots for every new movie they can think of. This was the case going into Sunday’s Super Bowl LX, with fans expecting top-secret, splashy new spots for Avengers: Doomsday, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, or The Odyssey. The Super Bowl audience ultimately didn’t get footage for any of those movies… but what we did get was odd.
There were spots for movies that are right around the corner: Scream 7, Project Hail Mary, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. And a few of the TV spots did function like a classic Super Bowl trailer: Disney/Pixar’s Hoppers sold its concept (and a cameo from TikTok’s favorite lizard) in a pre-game spot, and a spot for Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day combined existing footage with new shots seemingly confirming that yes, the movie is about aliens. Honorable mention for Supergirl, which sat out the Super Bowl itself but broke the Internet hours earlier during Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl, with a few seconds of new footage of Krypto the Superdog as a young puppy.
What Were This Year’s Super Bowl Trailers?
But any other movie-related TV spots were bizarre. The third Minions movie gave us thirty seconds of a Minion running through a white void towards the viewer, and the reveal that the film is titled Minions & Monsters. I will admit, that title drove me to seek out the full trailer online, only to discover that the plot is a Hollywood satire where the Minions perform a magic ritual to try to find monsters for their 1920s creature feature movie. Once they cast a spell, they meet a pint-sized talking Cthulhu (which I love purely on the basis that H.P. Lovecraft would probably hate it), and are transported into a high-fantasy world.
Once I saw that footage, I was surprised at how quickly I was sold on the movie… and I honestly wish even a fraction of that footage had been shown during the telecast, instead of leaving it up to viewers who happen to be enticed that the title isn’t just Minions 3.
On the flip side was the first look at Netflix’s The Adventures of Cliff Booth, David Fincher’s sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. We definitely got a look at the film itself during the game, and the teaser made a fun choice to scratch over cigarettes, middle fingers, and anything else potentially profane in the footage. But the teaser had no release date, no mention of Fincher and Tarantino, and not even a title reveal… just the Netflix logo at the end.
It immediately bifurcated the experience between anyone on Film Twitter who was already aware of The Adventures of Cliff Booth, and anyone else who had no idea about the film, or just thought it was a full-blown commercial that happened to have a cinematic aesthetic. Sure, it briefly got people talking… but did it accomplish the main goal of actually selling the movie to the biggest audience possible?
And Then There’s The Mandalorian and Grogu…
But the crown jewel was Disney’s spot for The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars movie in over half a decade. With less than 100 days until its release, and the only footage being a teaser trailer released all the way back in September, it was perfectly reasonable to expect the TV spot to actually sell the movie, before driving fans to watch a full trailer online.
Instead, the only footage of the movie was a 30-second parody of the Budweiser Clydesdale advertisements, down to having narration from Sam Elliot. The horses were swapped out for Tauntauns, before revealing their reins passing from Din Djarin and Grogu. The spot aired relatively early in the game (several hours before this year’s actual Budweiser ad), and an accompanying statement from Lucasfilm marketing brand lead Ryan Stankevich said that they wanted the advertisement to be “a nod to classic Big Game spots of years past”, and called the teaser “the perfect next step for our campaign as we lead up to their big screen debut this summer.”
But it still left fans feeling baffled. With just a few months to go, when will we get a trailer that actually reveals what the movie is about? Since when does Star Wars have to parody pop culture, instead of the other way around? And was this really the best use of the rumored $8-10 million price tag for a spot at this year’s Super Bowl?
I think that last question is the key with a lot of this year’s trailers and TV spots: if you’re going to spend the money to get on one of the biggest stages in pop culture, why are you going to make selling your movie such an arduous and confusing task? This year’s crop of Super Bowl spots were already frustrating, with nearly every commercial break having an advertisement for an AI company, a gambling site, or something involving a de-aged celebrity. More than ever, we needed the respite of a good TV spot or movie trailer… and it’s baffling that more studios didn’t fully rise to that occasion.
(featured image: Universal Pictures/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
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