Super Bowl LVIII movie trailers, ranked

A Quiet Place: Day One

Has anyone ever really wondered how the alien invasion from the Quiet Place movies began? They kind of addressed it in the originals, but this new prequel is all about those first few hours when people realized that the monsters were drawn to sound and that they would have to turn the world into a quieter place if they wanted to survive. The big draw here seems to be the scale and spectacle of it, with tons of creatures rampaging through New York City, but it’s not necessarily dramatic enough to make a huge Super Bowl impact.

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes

The apes are back, and this time they’ve got a whole kingdom. We’re getting closer to the world of the original Planet Of The Apes in this reboot franchise, assuming this is all part of the same canon as those earlier Apes reboot movies, with the apes talking about building a society and capturing humans and that sort of thing. As for this trailer ... once you’ve seen a trailer for an Apes movie, you’ve kinda seen them all.

IF

With the Quiet Place series going on without him, John Krasinski has moved on to the kid-friendly IF—which is about a little girl who develops the ability to see everyone’s IFs (or “Imaginary Friends”). The movie cheated a little, releasing a TV ad based around the old Office joke that Randall Park is actually John Krasinski, but then they released a regular ad on YouTube as well. It’s all fine, if you like Ryan Reynolds when he plays a normal guy who is not Deadpool.

The Fall Guy

The “this film has everything” framing device is fun, particularly since the trailer goes in a silly direction with it (“Ice” and “Ice crimes”?), but it loses it a bit with the “Ryan M@th?RF#*&!NG Gosling” thing. Lots of movies have him, it’s not that exciting ... but then it gets a little redeemed with “Emily M@th?RF#*&!NG Blunt. The movie still looks fun, despite that!

Wicked

If you, hypothetically, are the kind of person who has not yet been Wicked-pilled, this trailer may seem like a lot to take in. Cynthia Erivo is very green. And the brief glimpse of the fake Wizard face looks like when Michael Bay would zoom in tight on one of the Transformers (this is a compliment). They certainly seem to be swinging for the fences, at least, which is a good sign for a highly anticipated adaptation like this.

Despicable Me 4

The Jon Hamm voiceover is a funny conceit, and framing this as some exciting Google-y innovation is funny, and the ultimate reveal that AI art is bad because it’s made by the Minions is also funny. The ruling on the field, then, is that this is funny. Go Minions! Ba-na-na! Generative AI is evil and should be eradicated!

Deadpool & Wolverine

Other than actually showing Wolverine, this trailer offers pretty much everything we could’ve wanted out of a Deadpool 3—sorry, Deadpool & Wolverine—teaser. It’s got meta jokes, it’s got adult humor, it’s got references to MCU canon to address the fact that Deadpool is in the MCU now (they’re in the TVA from Loki!), so there’s not much to complain about ... but it would’ve been nice to really see Logan.

Twisters

The big moment in this trailer is when there are two tornados and the guy says “Twins!,” which seems like the perfect thing to happen in a movie called Twisters. Would Aliens have been better with a scene where Ripley saw two aliens and said “twins”? Sadly, we’ll never know.

Another thing that’s worth highlighting, because the trailer just kind of breezes past it, is that the plot of this one seems to be about releasing things into a tornado that can stop it—rather than releasing things into a tornado so they can get data on it (like in the original). That’s kind of interesting, right? Plus, the “Was that it?” bit at the end is a great gag for a trailer. That wasn’t it! There was another short scene!