Super Bowl Showdown: Which Movie Trailer Stole the Spotlight – Cliff Booth, The Mandalorian, or Minions?

STARRING: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding

DIRECTED BY: Kevin Williamson

STARRING: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding

The Scream 7 Underwhelming Tour continues apace with a new spot that makes it look like a musty legacy sequel rather than the continuation of a series that, as recently as a few years ago, was going pretty gangbusters with well-liked new characters and an abiding sense of fun contributing to record grosses. Amazingly, the newest entry in a meta-slasher series built of references to horror history somehow has issued multiple trailers and ads with barely a single reference to another horror movie (or even past movies, beyond the fact that they obviously exist). Obviously a single Super Bowl ad can’t change all that, but the movie’s final pitch looks dispiritingly like its dull initial pitch

RELEASE DATE: 3/6/26

DIRECTED BY: Daniel Chong

STARRING: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Dave Franco, Kathy Najimy

Rather than using its space to premiere a trailer for Toy Story 5, which still has zero footage released with four months to go until its release, Disney chose to instead promote its imminent Pixar project Hoppers, which comes out even sooner and features a girl doing an Avatar-like consciousness-transfer into the body of a beaver. In retrospect, this makes way more sense; Toy Story 5 is going to be massive no matter what, while there have only been a couple of original Pixar hits over the past decade. The downside is that Hoppers has already been advertised pretty extensively, so there wasn’t much left to surprise audiences with one more big pre-release push. Looks fun, though.

RELEASE DATE: 4/1/26

DIRECTED BY: Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic

STARRING: Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy, Brie Larson, Jack Black

Illumination, Nintendo, and Universal offer a few morsels of stuff fans can expect to see in the new Mario Bros. sequel – Baby Mario! Yoshi! A regular-sized dinosaur!  As such, they’re not really making not a high-stakes proposition. This movie is going to make a bunch of money, but probably not because Baby Mario briefly showed his face during the Super Bowl. After all, he’s no WaLuigi.

1RELEASE DATE: 7/1/26

DIRECTED BY: Pierre Coffin

STARRING: Minions (as themselves)

This should have been the most half-assed movie spot of the night: a brief entreaty to go watch an online trailer for another damn Minions movie, which last time around was basically a Despicable Me prequel, complete with a kid version of Gru. It turns out that a third Minions movie does the only thing left for the franchise: have the Minions summon Cthulhu?! I’m not sure why any of this is happening (as is often the case with these movies), but at least jumping on the kaiju bandwagon gives the Minions something else to do. Adult buzz for this series will always be limited, but I’m definitely dreading this less than I was pre-game.  

RELEASE DATE: 6/12/26

DIRECTED BY: Steven Spielberg

STARRING: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo

The precise premise of Steven Spielberg’s return to the sci-fi genre remains a little murky in this flashy second teaser. It seems like there are aliens living among us, and they’ve decided to come forward at a single strategic time. But which characters are aliens, why they all need to reveal themselves at once, and whether they’re friend or foe or somewhere in between all remain under wraps. It’s a great strategy for enticing Spielberg fans, and Universal seems to be betting that this will rightfully read as an event no matter what. Whether it really moves the needle for the normies who skipped the last bunch of Spielberg movies is harder to discern.

RELEASE DATE: 5/22/26

DIRECTED BY: Jon Favreau

STARRING: Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White, and Grogu as himself

The only game-specific movie trailer of the night was, quite unexpectedly, a Star Wars ad, with a brief new Mandalorian and Grogu spot spoofing the Budweiser Clydesdale ads, with Sam Elliott lovingly narrating about tauntauns, rather than horses. It’s hard to tell whether this really moves the needle much for an instantly recognizable brand, but it’s refreshing to see one of these ads have confident fun with the setting, rather than desperately cramming as much flash as possible into 30 or 60 seconds.

RELEASE DATE: 3/20/26

DIRECTED BY: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

STARRING: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Milana Vayntrub, James Ortiz

For my tastes, this feels like too much; if the early trailers for Project Hail Mary seemed to push a little too far into the movie, revealing (for example) the existence of a major alien character encountered during an amateur astronaut’s attempt to save the world, this final trailer seems to draw heavily from throughout what looks like the film’s third act. But sometimes that’s how you have to sell a movie without a clear brand name these days. (It’s also telling that a movie starring Ryan Gosling, directed by the 21 Jump Street/Spider-Verse guys, and based on a book by the author of The Martian doesn’t quite count as a brand name, despite being packed with them.) As the marketing campaign for Project Hail Mary ramps up, the final trailer seems perfectly timed and positioned to reach a mass audience. The movie now feels like a hit in waiting.

RELEASE DATE: Sometime in 2026

DIRECTED BY: David Fincher

STARRING: Brad Pitt, Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Timothy Olyphant

Nothing like some actual footage from a previously unseen (and still undated!) upcoming film to make Film Twitter wiseasses maybe feel a little sheepish about assuming a David Fincher-directed, Quentin Tarantino-written project would be underwhelming. Netflix pulled off a major surprise with a first look at their Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follow-up that seemingly no outlets were tipped off about ahead of time, gaining obvious advantage of the fact that this was the one Super Bowl movie that felt genuinely new (despite being a semi-sequel to a recent film). Strategic fake film scratches, glimpses of all manner of characters and locations, and that familiar greenish Fincher color timing all made Cliff Booth suddenly seem (even more) like a must-see. That added another layer of retro to this period piece: It also throws back to the days when a Super Bowl ad could single-handedly propel conversation about a new event movie.