What We Learned From the 2024 Super Bowl Movie Trailers

'Apes' rules, 'Twisters' leans into IP nostalgia, 'Deadpool 3' gets a boring title and the 'Quiet Place' prequel looks a little like a 'Cloverfield' movie

Thanks to Warner Bros.’ longstanding history of mostly sitting out the big game and Sony choosing to abstain, last night’s Super Bowl was – in terms of movie trailers – dominated almost entirely by Universal and Fox. Well, formally Fox, now 20^th Century Studios. It is telling that two of the buzziest trailers last night were from Disney but not Disney proper. No, I don’t care that you had to go online to see the full trailers because that’s been a semi-tradition, at least since 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Why pay $28 million for a 120-second trailer when you can pay $7 million for a 30-second spot and get all the online buzz from a full trailer courtesy of the Internet? 

Last night’s best trailer was the dynamite second full-length preview for Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. The franchise has a reputation for quality, and the earlier relaunch trilogy stands with Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy as one of the absolute best reboots of the last 20 years. The film looks excellent, including effects that don’t necessarily look rushed. What’s slightly amusing is how the apparent “apes realize that treating humans as pets or chattel is wrong” messaging echoes Tim Burton’s 2001 Planet of the Apes remake. That’s not a criticism, just a curiosity. In a year filled with commercially questionable franchise entries, Apes has the benefit of the doubt in terms of quality and commercial consistency. 

Last night, the two other high-buzz offerings were first-look previews for two of July’s bigger offerings. Well, the biggest movie of July (and probably the year) will likely be Despicable Me 4, which had a refreshing “AI art is bad, actually” 30-second spot before the game.  

We got our first look at Shawn Levy’s Deadpool and Wolverine, an uncreative title (not even Deadpool x Wolverine?) that reeks of flop sweat, even if the film itself looks fine. It’s an announcement trailer that was also mostly family-friendly for the large crowds who perhaps went to YouTube on their HDTVs and watched the full preview. I was amused to see other outlets acting like the participation of the Time Variance Authority was some not-yet-revealed mystery. Watching this trailer with captions “gives it away.” Ditto Matthew Macfadyen playing a character called Paradox. I’m reminded of the Spectre subtitles, which gave away the “Blofeld” twist an hour before the movie revealed it. 

I appreciate that this is being sold, at least initially, as primarily a Deadpool sequel. There’s no real hint of what Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson must do in this film, but again – announcement trailer. The “Marvel Jesus” line is SEO-friendly. However, I was waiting for the Merc with the Mouth to declare, “The hierarchy of power in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is about to change.” Beyond the quick glimpse of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in his comics-accurate yellow costume, I’m curious about a random henchman at the 108-second mark who looks like a henchman for Doctor Doom.  

Again, all these cameos, Easter Eggs and the like could be mere seasoning as Wade hops around various timelines. Ditto the TVA, which will almost certainly be presented in a way that will make sense even for folks who didn’t watch Loki. Again, the MCU has been good at making these non-Avengers solo flicks stand-alone, no matter which other MCU movies or shows you’ve seen. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was 95% a Stephen Strange sequel (“Shut up, Wanda, I don’t have time to watch your stupid TV show!”), so I’ll be cautiously optimistic that Deadpool and Wolverine is mostly a Wade Wilson threequel.  

1996 Warner Bros. distributed Twister in North America, while Universal handled overseas distribution. Twenty-eight years later, Twisters will be a Universal film domestically while Warner Bros. Discovery handles the international markets. I’ll ask why that is the next time I talk to either of them, but I’m guessing it’s nothing nefarious. However, this is as blatant an “IP for the sake of IP” sell as we’ve seen in a while.  

Twister was a monster hit ($495 million worldwide) 28 summers ago for a few specific reasons. It had then-groundbreaking special effects and came from director Jean Da Bont fresh off Speed, with marquee author Michael Crichton (three years after the first Jurassic Park movie) penning the screenplay. Throw in an added value cast with Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, plus an unapologetically sincere human-scaled story about a broken marriage, and you’ve got yourself a prototypical 90s summer blockbuster.  

Twisters looks fine, but it also features onscreen spectacle no more remarkable than the first Twister in 1996 or even the found-footage tornado melodrama Into the Storm from 2014. That said, I’m guessing director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) isn’t going to skimp on the melodrama. And while Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Anthony Ramos will be added-value elements at best, it may stand out as an old-school “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances” (Jurassic World, Wonka, etc.) tentpole. The $200 million question is whether general audiences will care about an original tornado-chaser flick that happens to share a title with a nearly three-decade-old blockbuster. 

The minute-long teaser for Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Wicked looks about as you’d expect, with an obvious attempt to make the stage-bound source material more explicitly cinematic. I am... intrigued that Universal no longer appears to be calling it Wicked Part I, even though, as far as we know, it’s still just the first half of the popular Broadway musical. I imagine they’ll be a little less shy about advertising that it’s a musical with onscreen singing since it’s a well-known IP with marquee characters, two lead actresses (Cynthia Erivo and Arianne Grande) with killer pipes, and at least one iconic tune (“Defying Gravity”). That said, I will be amused if they try to sell the thing, hiding that it’s a musical and just half a movie. 

The minute-long The Fall Guy spot was better than the first trailer. I remain puzzled that Universal seems weirdly hesitant just to lay out the premise (retired stuntman recruited to track down a missing action star to save his ex-wife's movie), coasting instead on vibes and the promise of old-school movie elements (action, romance, melodrama, etc.). Presuming it’s well-reviewed when the time comes, the David Leitch-directed film has all the elements of a breakout non-franchise theatrical (ensemble cast, marquee director, a clever high concept, good reviews and the promise of escapism), so I’d hope the second full trailer will highlight the “easy to explain high-concept.” 

The whole “Gosling with his shirt off” thing is amusing, but it again shows another advantage actors have over actresses. Actors can be sold on lust, but actresses cannot. It’s nice that there’s less overt media lechery than we saw in the 2000s, and it’s not like I need pop culture to validate my personal thirst (why yes, in terms of last night’s Universal trailers, both Daisy Edgar-Jones and Emily Blunt are both knockouts, thank you much). However, Hollywood tends to convince itself that the likes of Noah Centineo, Jacob Elordi or Regé-Jean Page are “movie stars” by virtue of journalists and social media folks publicly thirsting for them, so it’s another way that men tend to be seen as more bankable than women. 

The A Quiet Place: Day One trailer looks strong in scope, scale, and polish but is more of a conventional end-of-the-world horror movie than its genuinely clever first installment. Offhand, the Lupita Nyong'o-starring prequel seems closer to “What if Cloverfield wasn’t a found footage movie." That both qualifies as a change-up for this spin-off and is slightly ironic considering the online obsession in 2018 with arguing that the first A Quiet Place was or should be a Cloverfield installment.  The 30-second Marley: One Love commercial speaks for itself, while the If spot is a cut-down version of the self-mocking preview that debuted online early last week.  

Two final takeaways. First, two of the first three weekends of the summer will have high-concept, star-driven studio programmers (yes, The Fall Guy is based on a 1980s TV show, but it’s being sold as a star vehicle first). Second, Ryan Reynold has both this summer’s most explicit IP-driven franchise-centric nostalgia fest with Deadpool and Wolverine and this summer’s most ambitious wholly original would-be tentpole with If. There’s a case to be made that Reynolds has become more of an added value element in the eight years since Deadpool by becoming closer to a Jack Black-style “the kids love him” draw. Even the Deadpool movies are R-rated romps with the heart and tone of a PG-rated shaggy dog story, and I mean that as a compliment. 

Okay, that’s enough for now, although Monkey Man still looks aweome. It’s time to leave for this morning’s Madame Web screening. I can’t imagine why any boringly hetero dude could possibly want to see it. I’ll let you know if there’s enough Adam Scott to keep my wife happy.