Last year’s Super Bowl gave us the first real glimpse of footage from Deadpool & Wolverine and Wicked, which wound up occupying the number two and three spots on the list of 2024’s biggest grossing films at the worldwide box office. While it’s likely that football viewers likewise saw footage from at least one of 2025’s future Top 10 movies, maybe even top five, this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads don’t seem to have generated quite the same level of excitement – at least in part because none of them are quite that level of brand new. Even among the top five most-searched movie titles to buy Big Game time, viewers were mostly looking at cut-down or second-iteration versions of trailers that were released days or weeks beforehand, creating a tighter-than-usual competition for audience buzz. So here are the top five Super Bowl trailers based on their popularity on Google Trends – sorry, Smurfs; you didn’t make the cut – and a rundown of what they were hoping to sell.
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The Deal: The eighth Mission: Impossible movie is another globe-trotting megabudget adventure with jaw-dropping stunts for its unkillable star, Tom Cruise.
The Sell: Having dropped the “Part 1” from 2023’s Dead Reckoning, Mission: Impossible is going all-in on implying that this will be an Endgame-style finale to the longest-running non-rebooted film series in current circulation. It’s also pushing spectacle, of course, through glimpses of major stunts and a frame that widens from a narrow, super-widescreen image to eventually take up the whole TV screen (simulating a kind of IMAX-sized frame).
The Challenge: As much as film geeks love this series, that previous entry ticked down a bit from its predecessors in grosses – and the new one’s placement behind several family films serves as a reminder that this series doesn’t pull down Marvel/Star Wars/Disney numbers. Will audiences flock back with the promise of closure on a series that’s mostly known for Cruise and stunts?
The Upside: As the trailer reminds us with clips of earlier films, these movies do consistently deliver.
The Release Date: May 23, 2025
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The Deal: Disney’s biggest cartoon of the 2000s, and one of their best animated features ever, gets a live-action-ish reimagining, with humans opposite a CG Stitch.
The Sell: Stitch! Causing live-action mayhem! The most purely fresh movie spot of the night has Stitch running amok on the football field, in footage that probably isn’t even in the actual movie – just as clever teasers for the 2002 cartoon inserted him into other Disney movies.
The Challenge: Audience affection for the original film could make a remake an uphill battle, although audiences haven’t let the astonishingly terrible quality of certain other Disney remakes deter them!
The Upside: Stitch merch has been popular for years, so it seems like a lot of the marketing on this one is already done.
The Release Date: May 23, 2025
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The Deal: A soft reboot of a soft reboot, the seventh Jurassic Park movie (and fourth since the Jurassic World rebrand in 2015) goes… back to the original island, or at least a “research facility” akin to it, this time to capture some dino samples that might aid in the fight against cancer.
The Sell: Enough of the legacy characters and a charmless Chris Pratt: We’ve got Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali running from the dinos this time! Following a movie that only half-delivered on the bonkers premise of dinosaurs running wild around the planet, this trailer is clearly selling both back-to-basics and ScarJo looking cool in shades. That it’s directed by Gareth Edwards (Godzilla; Rogue One) doesn’t seem like a major part of it – maybe because every Jurassic World movie made more than his excellent Godzilla.
The Challenge: There’s clearly a pretty high floor for audiences showing up to Jurassic sequels. The question is whether the series is stuck at that level for the time being, or can jump back up to first-installment-level excitement.
The Upside: Edwards always makes great-looking movies, so maybe it’s best to let the dino-attack images speak for themselves.
The Release Date: July 2, 2025
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The Deal: Why should Disney be the only company using nostalgia and past triumphs to bilk families out of their money? How to Train Your Dragon – which came from the Lilo & Stitch creative team, by the way – gets the honor of becoming the first DreamWorks Animation title to get a live-action remake.
The Sell: Toothless! Causing live-action… love? The new spot continues an attempt to balance familiarity and awe, as it recreates many images and even shots from the first film, now with a drabber color palette! It seems to work, though; this one inspired a ton of search traffic. It makes sense; for all of the recent Disney remakes, the 2010-2020 era has yet to be touched (Moana is still shooting), which means DreamWorks will be first to market for a certain segment of that family market.
The Challenge: Again, it should be hard to compete with the beloved original, but that may be punted to become the sequel’s problem.
The Upside: If this hits, there are two sequels to draw from, and hopefully depart a little rather than slavishly imitating.
The Release Date: June 13, 2025
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The Deal: Several characters from Black Widow (played by Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Olga Kurylenko) team up with assorted miscreants and bad guys from other Marvel shows and movies (Sebastian Stan’s Bucky; Wyatt Russell’s disgraced ex-Captain America; Hannah John-Kamen’s Ant-Man and the Wasp baddie Ghost) for a semi-super anti-hero team.
The Sell: As earlier, the new trailer essentially pushes Thunderbolts* as the Marvel version of Suicide Squad (but, this being the MCU, they have to act like they invented the idea, just as they seemed to magically come up with the idea for lady superhero with Captain Marvel). What if semi-bad guys had their own Avengers-like team? Unusually for the cosmic-of-late MCU, the emphasis is on fighting, shooting, and a general lack of light-beam superpowers.
The Challenge: None of the movies or TV shows this one spins off from are among Marvel’s most popular, which means the concept and the MCU brand will have to get people in the door.
The Upside: Besides Marvel remaining a safe bet despite a few box office disappointments, Thunderbolts* taking the number one spot here indicates the MCU aren’t exactly hurting for attention, even if some people were probably Googling “what the hell is Thunderbolts” and “why does Thunderbolts have that dumb asterisk?”
The Release Date: May 2, 2025
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.