Did ‘Skyscraper’ Score Big? Let’s Rank All the Super Bowl Movie Commercials!
Yay, Eagles! All right, enough football talk. I’m here today to intricately break down the best part of Super Bowl LII — the movie trailers, obviously. Though we’re only in early February, the Big Game marks the unofficial beginning of the blockbuster season. (It’s no coincidence that Black Panther is out on Friday, February 16). No wonder Hollywood studios spent bea ucoup bucks for 30-to-60 seconds of prime advertising time. In between all the scoring, movie fans got to see early glimpses of everything from Dwayne Johnson’s death-defying stunts in Skyscraper to, um, Tom Cruise’s death-defying stunts in Mission: Impossible — Fallout. Here’s how the Super Bowl commercials all stacked up. And please keep in mind that none of these movies will be as eternal as Dirty Dancing:
1. Solo: A Star Wars Story
Huzzah, we finally get to see our favorite space scoundrel! At just 55 seconds, this thriller of a teaser did it all — introduce young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) and his bad-ass-with-a-killer-coat cohort, Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), feature a heart-tugging Chewbacca cameo and place them in a faintly recognizable galaxy far, far away. So much for the questionable buzz in the wake of that last-minute director switch to Ron Howard. It’s go time. Out Friday May, 25
2. Cloverfield: Paradox
For a decade, the Cloverfield franchise has been synonymous with clever viral marketing campaigns. This one topped ‘em all. With this trailer, Netflix only confirmed that it had acquired the third movie from Paramount (fine, whatever), said movie was going to drop tonight — as in, immediately following the game. Suddenly, viewers had to make the excruciating choice of whether to tune in to a five-hanky This Is Us or a freshly minted lost-in-space thriller starring Daniel Bruhl, Elizabeth Debicki, David Oyelowo and Chris O’Dowd. Now that I’ve seen both, I can confirm that the This Is Us viewers were the real winners of the night. Then again, Cloverfield: Paradox’s utter mediocrity only makes the gotcha commercial seem even more genius. Now streaming on Netflix
3. Skyscraper
No, he won’t back down. No he won’t back down. What, you expect anything less from Dwayne Johnson? This time, the action hero plays a man whose family is trapped 240 floors in the air in a skyscraper, yippee ki-yay. He’s got the biceps to save them, but he also has a prosthetic leg. And in case that hindrance isn’t clear in these 45 seconds, we see his character hanging upside down from the building with this prosthetic leg ready to detach from his body! If anyone can make this absurdly fun premise work, it’s the former Rock. And possibly Neve Campbell, who plays his wife. Out July 13
4. Mission: Impossible — Fallout
“How many times has Hunt’s government betrayed him, disavowed him, cast him aside?” Six times since 1996, to be exact. No matter. The indefatigable Tom Cruise is at it again in his latest installment, pushing bad guys into bathroom mirrors, flying helicopters into trucks and bungee jumping. (The actor even broke his ankle from one of those building jumps. Did you see the footage?) As usual, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson and Alec Baldwin are also hanging around to give him emotional agita. But dock one point for the shot of him facing doom on a mountain. Hello, been there, done that in M:I 2. Out July 27
5. Avengers: Infinity War
Look, the new Avengers movie going to be the smash of the summer. And it could be fantastic. But this entire 30-second spot was devoted to face time. As in, we just see the faces of nearly every hero in the Marvel galaxy, including Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman). Oh, and Groot! Great. But we can read the movie’s IMDB page or a recent Vanity Fair cover story and know this cast is loaded and ready for battle. A tiny bit more, please. Out May 4
https://youtu.be/TzNZDaaKQP4
6. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Chris Pratt is back. So is Bryce Dallas Howard and the T-Rex. But the rest of this trailer is awfully jumbled. It appears that the dinosaurs will eventually make their way from the island to the United States. And another lab-concocted dinosaur mashup, similar to the Indominus Rex, will wreak major destruction — and somehow get to a poor child’s bedroom?! Note that the only bold-faced name we get in this trailer is executive producer (and original Jurassic Park director) Steven Spielberg. That posits a bit of reassurance. Out June 22
Also published on Medium.