Once upon a time, movie stars only made Super Bowl ad appearances in Big Game trailers. These days, they’re too busy hawking commercial products to advertise, you know… movies. That’s why the movie studios that did fork over $8 million for Super Bowl airtime put the focus on characters and franchises that had a track record with audiences, from the dinos of Jurassic World to the Marvel-ous antiheroes of Thunderbolts.
The only promo that blurred the line was Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, a series that’s closely entwined with its leading man, Tom Cruise. That said, the push for this eighth installment leaned heavily into the “final” part of the title rather than promoting Cruise’s stunt work, as the advanced materials for the seventh film famously did.
Here are four takeaways from the Super Bowl’s muted night at the movies.
Studios are still betting on sequels
Of the five spots that aired during the Big Game, only one—Universal’s How to Train Your Dragon—wasn’t a direct continuation of an ongoing series. Of course, it’s also based on a pre-existing franchise, and the studio is certainly hoping that it’ll become the first installment in an all-new run of movies. The only original films that got any Super Bowl screentime were Apple’s F1 with Brad Pitt and Paramount’s Novocaine starring Jack Quaid, both of which aired before kickoff. For all the talk about movie audiences craving more originality, Hollywood clearly isn’t sure they’ll show up if there’s not a number or familiar name in the title.
Superheroes are fighting their way back
Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and Superman are all big-screen bound this year… but you wouldn’t know that based on the Super Bowl. The only comic book-derived movie with a big game presence was Thunderbolts, Marvel’s answer to DC’s villain-based Suicide Squad series. That tracks with the way audiences have been responding to antiheroes in a big way recently, whether it’s the snarling odd couple of Deadpool & Wolverine or the anti-Avengers on The Boys. Warner Bros. Discovery did carve out some time during the Puppy Bowl to hype the Man of Steel and his Dog of Steel, but apparently, they didn’t think a kinder, gentler hero would fly in the Big Game.
