The Super Bowl has historically been a big moment for movie studios, where the biggest movies get 30 seconds of air time in front of the eyes of the entire nation. This year, though, studios are scaling back Super Bowl movie trailers by quite a bit.
News comes via Variety and Deadline, both of which report that the Super Bowl ad lineup will have much less in the way of movie trailers this year compared to previous years. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any trailers, though. Amazon Prime Video is expected to show off Eddie Murphy’s Coming 2 America. According to Deadline, Disney will have two to four trailers, and Universal plans to show M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming thriller Old.
That’s a big drop from last year’s list. The 2020 Super Bowl was host to a bunch of blockbuster trailers, including Fast and Furious film F9, Marvel’s Black Widow, Mulan, James Bond’s No Time To Die, A Quiet Place II, Sonic the Hedgehog, Top Gun: Maverick. and others. Within weeks of the big game, though, much of the country went into various stages of lockdown. Of those films, only Sonic the Hedgehog made it into American theaters, and Mulan went straight to Disney+ to pilot its premium-viewing model.
The rest of those movies (and many more) have seen at least one delay, and some three or more. F9 was set to come out on May 28, 2020, but is now scheduled for May 22, 2021. Vaccines are rolling out, but distribution takes time, and it’s well within the realm of possibility that F9 might see yet another delay before release to reflect how ready people are to get back into theaters. In other words, studios aren’t yet ready to commit to release dates they might not be able to keep.
Even ahead of the Super Bowl, we’re already seeing fewer trailers on television. Variety notes that, when comparing the December 28 to January 3 period last year to this year, the number of 30-second TV ads from studios on top networks decreased by 82% in 2020-2021.
Interestingly, though, it seems like streamers are mostly sitting out, too. Netflix doesn’t appear to have a repeat of its 2018 Cloverfield Paradox micdrop moment planned; Apple TV, Peacock, and Hulu are skipping Super Bowl LV as well. Deadline reports that HBO Max is sitting out, though Variety says the company will take some time to advertise all those formerly theater-only movies coming to Considering the way companies like Disney and WarnerMedia have shifted strategies to emphasize streaming, this seems like the year they’d want to make a big splash, but that’s reportedly not the case.
When Kansas City Chiefs go head to head with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this Sunday, though, there will still be plenty of ads, and we’ll be covering all the standouts.
