Super Bowl 2019: New England Patriots vs. Los Angeles Rams: commercials, halftime show, and biggest moments

For the brief period during his performance at the Super Bowl halftime show when Adam Levine was wearing a shirt, people watching at home all wondered the same thing: Does he look like my couch?

In many cases, the answer proved to be yes. Not just couches but throw pillows, curtains, and other random upholstery all seemed to share the same geometric pattern as the tank top worn by the lead singer of Maroon 5.

Every once in a while, a marketing gimmick manages to surprise. And on a Super Bowl Sunday when the Big Game’s signature commercials were nostalgia-heavy, tech-skeptical, and overall less than stellar, one of the messages that made the biggest impact came from one very small egg.

We begin with an egg — or rather, a specific photo of an egg. A month ago, said photo became a viral internet phenomenon after an anonymous Instagram user posted it to the account world_record_egg. The account’s sole purpose, at least at the time, was to unseat billionaire makeup mogul Kylie Jenner as the record holder for the world’s most-liked Instagram photo.

During the 2019 Super Bowl, America’s biggest unifying event, at least on social media, wasn’t the Big Game itself, or the conversation surrounding its commercials. It wasn’t even hating the New England Patriots.

It was ... dunking on Fox News’s Dana Perino’s attempt to make queso.

The Super Bowl is one of the most-watched events on TV, so it’s no surprise that movie studios and television networks consider it a prime time to debut trailers for upcoming blockbusters and marquee TV series.

And though there weren’t as many big blockbusters teases during Super Bowl 53 as there have been in years past, we still got looks at Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, Wonder Park, Jordan Peele’s Us, and more during the big game and its preshow.

Like Maroon 5’s best songs, Maroon 5’s 2019 Super Bowl halftime show was aggressively fine, with fleeting moments of slight glee.

And that’s what the NFL seemed to be going for.

There’s a sequence in Ralph Breaks the Internet, the 2018 sequel to 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph, wherein Ralph, a video game villain who finds himself wandering the backroads of the internet, finds himself in a sort of meme studio, a factory designed to just keep coming up with funny ideas that might make people laugh, provided they’re in video or GIF form.

Ralph turns out to be a natural at this form of meme-making. He’ll throw himself into any wild scenario, expose himself to any form of terrible pain if it means a few quick laughs. He’ll even let himself be attacked by a swarm of angry bees; so long as such a stunt boosts his popularity, why not? He needs the money. (I’m not going to summarize the plot of Ralph Breaks the Internet here — but trust me, he needs the money.)

Some brands leaned on nostalgia for their Super Bowl ads. Others turned to robots.

The takeaway? Tech isn’t so great, but being human is.

Another Super Bowl Sunday has come and gone, and once again, the game allowed America to renew its fervor for one of its favorite unofficial pastimes: yelling about the New England Patriots.

On Sunday, the Patriots danced away with its sixth Super Bowl victory — tying the Pittsburgh Steelers for the most Super Bowl wins of any team in NFL history — by defeating the Los Angeles Rams 13-3. But even before this historic win, the Patriots were frankly astonishing. During the era of head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady, who both joined the team in 2000, the Patriots have gone to the Super Bowl nine times; 2019 marked their third consecutive Super Bowl. They’ve won 16 division titles, made it to the AFC championships for the past eight years in a row, and, since 2001, have never had a losing season.

Your heart might not be ready, but Disney’s Pixar is. The animation studio has released a new teaser trailer for Toy Story 4, the highly anticipated fourth chapter in an ongoing saga about how much our toys love us and the lengths they will go to to prove that love. The trailer debuted Sunday, during Super Bowl 53.

Last we saw Woody and Buzz and their fellow toys in 2010’s Toy Story 3, Andy (their owner) was headed to college — which led to an existential crisis of sorts for Andy’s toys. In the end, Andy gave the beloved toys to a new child, Bonnie, to take care of them. And in the interim, during a stint at Sunnyside Daycare that made up most of the film’s action, the toys (with the help of Woody and Buzz) overthrew Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear’s cruel regime and made the day care a better place for all toys.

“Let’s all experience ... something ... together,” Zoe Kravitz whispers at the start of Michelob Ultra’s 2019 Super Bowl ad.

Kravitz is alone on an island with the company’s new light beer, called Pure Gold. Pure Gold is “beer ... in its organic form,” she also whispers. She clacks her fingernails on the glass bottle, pops off the top with a satisfying click, listens to the bubbles fizz, and smiles serenely.

Audi’s Super Bowl ad stars the super-sleek, presumed Tesla-challenging e-tron GT electric sedan, currently set to go on sale in early 2021.

The commercial is pretty odd from top to bottom, in that it starts with a young man wandering through some sort of agricultural dreamscape and stumbling upon his dead grandfather in front of a large farmhouse. Grandpa takes him into the barn and reveals the e-tron GT, which the grandson gets into and does a brief Marty McFly impression. Then he’s jolted awake: He was choking on a cashew. He’s actually in a gray-on-gray-on-gray office building and not in a fancy electric car.

Though the various brands that shell out millions of dollars for Super Bowl advertisements are not actively in cahoots, the big-budget end products typically circle around a theme, or at least a common mode of approaching the Big Game. This year, many brands are relying on nostalgia; in order to be understood at all, you need working knowledge of some old pop culture object. If you get the joke, you feel good, you buy stuff.

This theme is also a reboot. Adweek noticed the same predilection for nostalgia in last year’s slate of Super Bowl ads, which included Cindy Crawford rebooting her Pepsi ad from 1992 and Steven Tyler using a Kia as a time machine back to the 1970s.

HBO’s Game of Thrones’ eighth and final season is only two months away, and in its most recent efforts to hype up fans, the show appeared in a Bud Light commercial Sunday night during Super Bowl 53.

The commercial shows a king and a queen at a jousting event, merrily drinking Bud Lights and cheering on the Bud Knight. Moments later, however, the knight gets knocked off his horse by Gregor Clegane, the huge and notoriously violent fighter from Game of Thrones, who goes by the nickname the Mountain.

On Sunday, February 3, more than 100 million Americans are expected to watch Super Bowl 53 and its halftime show. That kind of viewership means that most years, the halftime show is a coveted performance slot — but this year, it’s shrouded in controversy.

Maroon 5 are set to perform, with Travis Scott and Big Boi making guest appearances. But all three acts were added to the slate late in the process, after multiple stars reportedly turned down the opportunity to appear during the halftime show. And both Maroon 5 and Travis Scott have fielded major backlash after announcing their performances.

During this year’s Super Bowl, you can expect to see expensive and flashy ads from all the usual suspects: car companies like Kia and Audi, junk food and soda brands like Pepsi and Frito-Lay, and classic drugstore brands such as Procter & Gamble’s Olay and Colgate. What you won’t see advertised during the big game, though, is cannabis.

Acreage Holdings, a medical cannabis company that operates in 11 states, says that last week, CBS, which broadcasts the Super Bowl, rejected an ad it had submitted to run during the game. The network told the cannabis company that the ad was “not consistent with the network’s advertising policies.” In an email to Vox, CBS said it does “not currently accept cannabis-related advertising.”

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?”

Super Bowl LIII (a.k.a. Super Bowl 53) is upon us. And just like any other year, 2019’s Big Game brings with it the usual array of controversy, marketing blitzes, and, oh, yeah, football.

This year’s Super Bowl will air on CBS on Sunday, February 3. Kickoff is at 6:30 pm Eastern / 3:30 pm Pacific.

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, winner of five Super Bowls, is one of the greatest athletes of all time. He’s also a peddler of baseless health claims, including in his 2017 exercise and diet book, The TB12 Method.

The book details Brady’s 12 principles for “sustained peak performance,” which he says will keep him on the field at least until the ancient-for-football age of 45.

This is the weekend when all your friends are talking about the superb owl.

No one can deny that the superb owl is a national obsession. It’s trending on Twitter and lighting up Facebook — some Las Vegas bookies are even taking superb owl bets. So we’ve put together these superb owl facts to explain the majestic bird of prey everyone is talking about.

Over the past 20 years, more than $7 billion in public money has gone toward financing the construction and renovation of NFL football stadiums. Owners argue that public investment in private football franchises will bring a boom of economic activity to local economies. But this argument doesn’t hold up.

In reality, stadiums and their upkeep wind up costing cities millions of dollars. For owners, new stadiums mean more profits. They get to host the Super Bowl, sell naming rights to other corporations, and build increasingly opulent and expensive premium seating. For cities, nabbing an itinerant football franchise looking for a new home field can be a big political win. And residents want teams and the hometown pride that comes with it.