While there might have been a brief uptick in the viewership for recent awards ceremonies, the act of communal live TV watching is still not what it used to be. In the US, the one constant is sport and while weekly games might only appeal to an impassioned subset of fans, the Super Bowl’s broader appeal makes it the most attractive night of the year to advertisers, their big chance to make an impression with an audience that’s typically over 100 million.
It’s also inevitably the most expensive with a 30-second spot costing about $8m this year – a record amount – and so it’s left up to the biggest of the big companies to get involved. On the film side, that translated to just Paramount, Disney, Universal and Warners flashing the cash but was it money well spent?
Smurfs
In year that is lazily bringing back more franchises than ever before from Jurassic World to Final Destination to 28 Days Later to How to Train Your Dragon, why not try once again to make Smurfs work? The characters have moved from Sony to Paramount after two connected films and one reboot and all bets have now been placed on Rihanna as Smurfette, following in the hallowed footsteps of Katy Perry and Demi Lovato. After all that wait, is the new Rihanna album going to be a Smurfs soundtrack?
Jurassic World Rebirth
While the Jurassic World movies might have failed to reach the lofty heights of Jurassic Park, I’d argue they were mostly more successful than the two films that followed it. That, some hard-to-shake nostalgia and the pairing of Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali make it difficult not to get just a bit excited about the still completely unnecessary Jurassic World Rebirth. The new spot is essentially a remix of the recent trailer but then that was a remix of everything that came before anyway.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
There are many, many restarts this summer – Final Destination, Fantastic Four, Jurassic World – but there is one major end. Just don’t tell Tom Cruise. What is now being marketed as the last Mission: Impossible film was once supposed to be the second part of the seventh, yet underwhelming box office has changed both title and strategy with Paramount hoping, reportedly against its star’s wishes, to wrap things up. This new spot pushes that selling point hard, a sad goodbye for one of the only consistently enjoyable franchises we have.
Novocaine
As audiences prefer to stick with known quantities like Keanu Reeves, Gerard Butler and Jason Statham, Hollywood continues to try out new action stars with mostly middling results. Aaron Taylor-Johnson couldn’t get anyone craving some Kraven the Hunter, Henry Cavill scored two flops back-to-back with Argylle and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and this weekend, Ke Huy Quan’s first leading vehicle Love Hurts went nowhere for nobody all at once (it opened to a pitiful $5.8m). Will they warm to Ana de Armas in the John Wick summer spinoff Ballerina or maybe Jack Quaid, best known for Amazon’s The Boys and last month’s Companion, in the gimmicky caper Novocaine? He plays a man incapable of feeling pain whose girlfriend is kidnapped. Given the pricey placement of this new tease, it’s clear that Paramount is hoping for big things from a film that looks like it has a very small budget.
How to Train Your Dragon
Maybe one of the least necessary animated-to-live-action transfers we’ve been lumped with for a while, the How to Train Your Dragon spot doesn’t offer anything we didn’t already expect and haven’t already seen before. It feels like the original wasn’t all that long ago and with the dragon looking essentially the same in both, it’s a struggle to know why we’re here again.
Lilo & Stitch
Disney deserves some reluctant credit here for creating a Super Bowl ad that doesn’t just resemble a condensed trailer, turning something eye-rollingly predictable (a live-action Lilo & Stitch) into an advert we’re actually surprised by. The 30-second spot has the once-animated, now CG monster invade the pitch, helping to kick off a campaign that will most likely make the most of all Fox and Disney channels in the next few months.
Thunderbolts
Disney also teased its other big summer bet Thunderbolts with a 30-second version of a brand new trailer that’s just been released online. “The Avengers are not coming,” says Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Wario-ed Nick Fury at the start of the preview for the sorta antiheroes assemble caper (technically not true given that a new Avengers film has been given the green light) before a series of quips, explosions and an ironically used 80s pop song are trotted out to hopefully lure Deadpool fans to their local cinema this May.
F1
The big Super Bowl spot for Brad Pitt’s F1, one of the summer’s biggest question marks, continues the good work done by last year’s first trailer, focusing on multi-sense immersion. It’s set to be the most authentic racing film we’ve ever seen, made in collaboration with the governing body behind Formula One and filmed during actual events over the last couple of years, and the stripped-back new ad highlights such authenticity. Hopes are high with a giant budget and its backer, Apple, still waiting for its first genuine box office hit, but if anyone can make this kind of unlikely magic happen, it’s Joseph Kosinski, who also steered Top Gun: Maverick from curio to blockbuster.
