Super Bowl 2020: San Francisco 49ers vs. Kansas City Chiefs

Super Bowl Sunday ended with the Kansas City Chiefs winning their first Super Bowl in 50 years, after a J.Lo-centric halftime show whose quality was never in doubt. Meanwhile, one of the more controversial moments of the evening came when two celebrities decided to remain seated.

According to a video published by TMZ, Beyoncé and Jay-Z did not stand for the national anthem when it was sung at the start of the game by Demi Lovato.

While Super Bowl Sunday is the day when the nation known as America comes together to sit inside and watch two teams tackle, intercept, block, and run each other (and their brains) into the ground, it’s also about much more than football. The Super Bowl is a huge cultural event with a massive audience — which means movie studios and TV networks that want to attract the most eyeballs to their upcoming releases will usually buy some very expensive ads to get those releases in front of said eyeballs.

If there’s a big movie or television show you’re looking forward to, you may be able to get a special glimpse of it during the Big Game. Here are all the movie and TV trailers that aired during the 2020 Super Bowl:

Since the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain America and Iron Man have been a constant. But we now have an idea of what the world will be like without them, as the first mini trailers for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, and Loki, three upcoming Marvel TV series that will air exclusively on Disney+, were released during the Super Bowl.

The three shows were spliced into a (very short) Super Bowl trailer. Falcon is seen launching Cap’s signature shield. Wanda, a.k.a. Scarlet Witch, and Vision find themselves in an I Love Lucy-like alternate reality. And Loki just says he wants to burn it all down, whatever “it” may be.

Considering the NFL’s contentious relationship with stars like Rihanna and Cardi B — both Rihanna and Cardi, along with other musicians, have said they won’t perform for the league because of its treatment of Colin Kaepernick — it’s something of a marvel that the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show boasted kinetic talent in the form of superstars Jennifer Lopez and Shakira (especially compared to Maroon 5, who headlined the halftime show in 2019). The call to book the duo was facilitated by Jay-Z, through his still relatively new partnership with the NFL; the women made history as the first Latina artists to headline the Super Bowl halftime show.

Lopez’s appearance was especially timely in light of her recent turn as the glamorous underdog Ramona in Hustlers. Her performance as a stripper who just wanted to get even had a metaphysical edge to it as Lopez, herself an underdog as an actress and a musician, finally got the credit she’s been fighting for her entire career.

Mr. Peanut is dead. The monocle-wearing mascot of the snack food company Planters was announced deceased by the official Mr. Peanut Twitter account on January 22, at the age of 104, even though technically he should have died more than a century ago because peanuts, which are not sentient, go bad after about four months.

Yes, it is confusing for an anthropomorphized peanut to die. It also looks quite obviously like a stunt to sell more Planters peanuts, though it’s a potentially flawed marketing strategy, as Mr. Peanut is arguably more famous than Planters itself.

Post Malone buys Bud Light Seltzer at a gas station. Winona Ryder goes to Winona, Minnesota. Lil Nas X and Sam Elliott have a dance battle showdown in the Old West.

These are just a handful of this year’s Super Bowl ads, and for the most part, they’re a pretty good summary of what viewers saw during the Big Game: practically no politics from brands. Celebrity cameos are nothing new for the year’s biggest advertising bonanza, but what’s notable about the 2020 Super Bowl commercials is that during arguably the most contentious election of the past two decades, brands decided to go escapist — literally, in at least three cases in which the dominant theme was “outer space.”

Presidents giving interviews before Super Bowls has become a tradition — Barack Obama fielded questions about Benghazi and his detractors; Donald Trump has answered questions about immigration and the turnover on his staff.

While the questions can be tough, given the spirit of the day, these interviews aren’t always the most rigorous of exercises. But Trump found himself before an exceptionally friendly interviewer this time around, sitting down with Fox News’s Sean Hannity ahead of the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers.

This Sunday, there will be two competitions happening as the 2020 Super Bowl unfolds. The San Francisco 49ers will, of course, face the Kansas City Chiefs for the Super Bowl 54 title.

But there will also be an undercard fight of sorts: President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg have both spent millions on competing ads that will air during the Big Game.

Football isn’t just a contact sport — it’s a dangerous game of massive bodies colliding into one another. And while it may seem obvious that this sport can do extraordinary damage to brains and bodies, it’s taken far too long for the NFL, the medical community, and football fans to fully reckon with this.

Doctors have learned a tremendous amount about concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain condition believed to be caused by repeated hits to the head, since the first former NFL player was diagnosed with CTE in the early 2000s. Concern around the issue has only grown now that more than 100 former NFL players have received a postmortem diagnosis of CTE, and new research is finding that youth football may be a risk factor for CTE down the line.

Kevin Roth is a meteorologist, and for the most part, his résumé looks like you might imagine it: He has a master’s degree in meteorology, got his start at small-market television stations, and worked his way up to a more prominent perch in Dallas/Fort Worth — the fifth-largest media market in the country. But these days, his forecasts sound a little bit different.

“It’s not that it’s going to be storming or rainy or all that terrible, but we should see about a 15 mph sustained wind, with gusts up to 20,” he tells the audience before diverging from a typical weatherman’s shtick. “This is borderline. I’m more worried if the sustained winds are 20.”

The Big Game has come once again, which you might have been expecting, depending on how you organize your mind and whether you understand why the Big Game is sometimes in January and sometimes in February.

If you weren’t expecting the Big Game: The Big Game is today, at 6:30 pm Eastern, and will most likely last somewhere between three and a half and four hours, even though during the Big Game, only about 12 of those minutes will be spent watching football actually being played. Most of the Big Game will be advertisements, men talking while surrounded by various brand logos, and a sponsored halftime show. Billions of dollars will change hands during the Big Game, and, by the way, why do advertisements and radio hosts and social media accounts run by brands constantly refer to the Super Bowl as “the Big Game?”

A 2017 Super Bowl ad featuring a sexy Mr. Clean trended on social media, became talk show fodder, and resulted in an uptick in buzz for the brand. But it did not significantly sway more customers to go out and mop their floors with the product.

Companies pay a whopping $5 million to run a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl. That lofty price tag might be worth it for some companies; after all, more than 111 million Americans tuned in for the big game in 2018. But for others, having a commercial air during the most-watched sporting event of the year may be a bad investment. Some ads simply don’t strike a chord with customers, and others may trend on social media but still fail to inspire viewers to actually buy the product marketed.

Sports broadcasts are wallpapered with gratuitous graphics. They’re moving, they’re shiny, they sound like Transformers. Take them or leave them, the experience of watching football doesn’t really change.

With one exception: The yellow first-down line. Since the late 1990s, the virtual yellow line has been quietly enhancing football broadcasts by giving viewers a live, intuitive guide to the state of play. The graphic is engineered to appear painted on the field, rather than simply plopped on top of the players, so it doesn’t distract from the game at all.