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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Sport
Benjamin Lee and Jake Nevins

Super Bowl 2019: everything but the football – as it happened

Adam Levine of Maroon 5 at half-time.
Adam Levine of Maroon 5 at half-time. Photograph: Al Bello/Getty Images

We Will Be Bored

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Learning absolutely nothing from last year’s non-event that saw a faux-woodsy Justin Timberlake blandify the half-time show, this year Maroon 5 sunk it even further. The band delivered an inoffensive, hard to hate but hard to feel anything for performance with jarring cameos that felt tacked on.

Ads-wise, a lot of studios chose to sit this one out with many expected trailers not showing up. Marvel and Disney dominated while there were some inspired concepts from the non-entertainment side of things, such as the insane Skittles musical.

It’s crazy how one of the most in-demand gigs in the industry has now become a poisoned chalice but Maroon 5 has gained approximately nothing from getting involved this year and it’s going to be a tough ask to find someone to perform in 2020.

Us

There’s inevitable trepidation surrounding the release of the impossible-to-Google Us, writer-director Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out, a film that was a box office smash, a thinkpiece generator, an Oscar-winner and a cultural phenomenon. But last year, the first teaser helped to allay fears with arguably one of the most effectively assembled trailers we’ve seen for a long time and now, Peele has shared a second, tantalising look at his nightmarish new thriller about a family haunted by doppelgangers, starring Lupita Nyong’o and Black Panther breakout Winston Duke. Its March release seems scarily far away.

Toy Story 4

One of the most anticipated ads of the night ended up being a cruelly brief one but regardless, will help sustain excitement until the fourth, and likely final, Toy Story film is released later this year.

Stop what you’re doing. The whole Bud Light v the corn industry feud just got real.

I’ve just been emailed the following statement from an Anheuser-Busch as a way of calming things down. Good luck with that!

“Anheuser-Busch fully supports corn growers and will continue to invest in the corn industry. Bud Light’s Super Bowl commercials are only meant to point out a key difference in Bud Light from some other light beers. This effort is to provide consumers transparency and elevate the beer category.”

Verizon honors first responders

Good stuff from Verizon, whose commercial is an ode to first responders, with testimony from 12 football players involved in gruesome accidents, plus LA Chargers coach Anthony Lynn and a bevy of firefighters, policeman, and EMS workers. A 30-minute documentary telling each story in more detail is available online, but for the purposes of airing a spot during the game Verizon’s managed a truncated 60-second version too.

For those who like things easy

I hope you’re not tired of Tony Romo (in the booth tonight) and his now famously prescient commentary. But of course you didn’t think we’d get through an entire Super Bowl without a commercial starring Romo, who after freakishly calling plays before they happened in the AFC Championship Game a few weeks ago has been duly christened the wunderkind of pro football punditry. Here he promotes Sketchers slip-ons, which, in a failure of the copy team’s adjectival imagination, are described as “effortless” and “incredibly comfortable.” The shoes are not bad-looking though, and Romo, like fellow QB Aaron Rodgers, oozes the approachable vibe demanded of spots like these.

Maximalist advertising from Mercedes-Benz

Where to start with this Mercedes-Benz spot, which features a lost cat, a high-stakes golf putt, an opera performance, a whale, a rocket, Ludacris, and a very good-looking dude-bro, all in an attempt to tell us that the German carmaker now has its own Alexa (which, to Amazon’s credit, is becoming a consumer catchall for personal assistant-devices the way Kleenex is for tissues). Basically, you can tell the new Mercedes A-Class to start the music, change the colors on the dashboard, adjust the temperature, all things I thought Mercedes cars did already!

One of the strangest commercials tonight isn’t really a commercial. In an attempt to outdo all competitors, Skittles created an entire musical rather than just an ad, starring Dexter’s Michael C Hall.

The 30-minute event premiered today at Manhattan’s Town Hall and according to Deadline, it was, well, pretty damn weird:

So with no spoiler alerts necessary – you’ll never see the likes of Skittles again – the plot was this: On Feb. 3, 2019, various and sundry New Yorkers wander inside a Manhattan bodega, making ready for the Big Game, some mentioning the large crowds outside – the first of many self-references to the Skittles event itself – when in walks Michael C. Hall himself, dressed in a cat costume that he explains is for a Super Bowl commercial.

Hall is in a grouchy mood, unhappy with himself for selling out and feeling silly in the cat suit. Soon enough he’s belting out the first of the show’s three very catchy show-tune-style songs, this one called “This Might Have Been A Bad Idea.” (“Sometimes,” he sings, “things turn out exactly as you fear”).

Then, after popping a Skittle and changing his mind about his decision (“I’ll win a Tony!”), Hall is interrupted by one complaining audience member after another.

“I don’t really get what’s going on,” says a guy who identifies himself as Mitch from St. Petersburg (Largo, technically). “I thought this was gonna be one of those crazy ads with talking animals, like the ones that are on during the game.”

We’re all Rihanna

Video of the full Maroon 5 halftime show? Anyone? Anyone?

You Are My Fire

You’ve got to give it up for Doritos for turning their Super Bowl advertisement into a joint music video featuring the Backstreet Boys and Chance the Rapper and largely foregoing any promotional jargon for their product save the fact that it is “hot.” Miscellaneous observations: this is the night’s most colorful commercial; Chance does not seem entirely at ease with the choreography; I Want It That Way remains an earworm.

Michelob Ultra goes ASMR but it’s very hard to hear

According to the internet phenomenon known as ASMR the faint sounds of the ocean and the wind and Zoe Kravitz whispering and tapping lightly on a bottle of Michelob Ultra in the brand’s latest ad are intended to arouse sensations of calm and euphoria. Congratulations to you if it worked!

Bob Dylan for Budweiser

A simple spot from Budweiser, with a wind-swept canine on the back of a horse carriage, set to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Very Americana, very Coen brothers. At the end Budweiser says their beer is now brewed with wind power. I don’t pretend to know the environmental implications of beer-brewing methods but the Fossil Fuel folks are apparently already attacking the commercial so props to Budweiser.

This is oddly transfixing

A Dystopian Alexa

With its bottomless coffers Amazon predictably buys a 90-second spot, with cameos from Harrison Ford, Forest Whitaker, and Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana. It probably unintentionally calls to mind the sad world of Spike Jonze’s movie Her, where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his operating system, except here Whitaker listens to his podcast through his toothbrush, Ford’s French bulldog barks at Alexa in dog-language, and the Broad City gals are catapulted from a hot tub after requesting it play music. It’s kind of funny and self-deprecating but it’s also depressing that Amazon thinks this is the sort of messaging that will sell Alexa’s and they’re probably right? Prior to game time this ad had nearly 25m YouTube views, so yeah, they’re probably right.

Want to read more about just how meh Maroon 5’s halftime performance was? Here you go!

We’re not the only ones happy about the non-Cloverfieldness of tonight

A Tearjerker from Microsoft

It’s really easy to be cynical watching massive corporations pay millions to air their 30-second commercials during the championship game of a league that earns $8b in annual revenue and cannot be brought to feign interest in or concern for the veritable crisis that is traumatic brain injury in its employ. But Microsoft’s genuinely inspiring commercial promoting an adaptive video game controller for the physically disabled provided a nice reprieve from the mechanisms of the football-industrial complex.

Comedian Aparna Nancherla made an appearance in the Bubly ad earlier and has since tweeted that she’s donating some of her salary:

Remember last year when we got all excited by the news that Netflix was going to surprise drop the third Cloverfield movie the moment the game ended? And then remember how appalled we all felt once we’d actually watched the damn thing? Well, let’s live in that moment again shall we:

Hanna

Seen by some as another post-Atonement misstep for director Joe Wright (it did follow maudlin Oscarbait drama The Soloist), Hanna was viewed by others as an audacious curio. A strange, unconventional thriller starring Saoirse Ronan as a child assassin and a deliciously campy Cate Blanchett as the woman hunting her down, it didn’t land commercially but Amazon has taken the concept and turned it into a series, one that looks solidly entertaining but not quite as odd as its source material. As a special bonus, there’s also a “surprise” drop of the first episode right after the game ends which will only be available for 24 hours.

Daniel Radcliffe is supporting the Rams, which given the theme of this liveblog isn’t of great interest, but hey he does have something to say about Tom Brady’s political stance...

Close Talker

Now, this is a good commercial: witty, relatable, to-the-point, and Seinfeld-referential. Luke Wilson plays a close talker much like Elaine’s boyfriend from the season five two-parter The Raincoats. Wilson mentions “all-new Colgate total” in the first five seconds and spends the rest of the spot getting right up in his colleagues’ grills to share his enthusiasm for this new toothpaste. My only gripe is the strangely phrased tagline “do more for your whole mouth,” which is both vague and syntactically awkward.

In related news, Netflix has tweeted that viewership is down 32% compared to a normal Sunday, which means that earlier Guillermo del Toro tweet didn’t do much good...

Our Planet

Furthering their plan for world domination, Netflix is now intent on taking over the genre of wildlife documentary. Tonight they dropped the first teaser for Our Planet, made in collaboration with David Attenborough. It’s often hard to tell these apart on first sight but we’ll find out more in March.

Ever wondered how they manage to get the halftime show in and out quite so effectively? Check out this rather excellent video:

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There’s also some frustration with Levine’s decision to take his whole damn shirt off, given how Janet Jackson was treated a few years back for a much smaller flash.

And the reaction to Maroon 5 is, hmmmm, not good:

Bubly/Bublé

Bold of Pepsi to advertise its new seltzer water product with Michael Bublé, one of those super-corny celebrities who it’s unreasonably fun to dunk on. The joke is that his name is pronounced boo-blay and the drink is pronounced bubbly (but spelled, inexplicably, with only one “b”). Ba-dum-ching. But there is a brief cameo by the comedian Aparna Nancherla and that is something to get excited about.

Now with added footage:

And Big Boi arriving in a car!

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This is a take

That Travis Scott stage-dive that ended safely (he returned to the stage at the end)

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The vest has been replaced with nothing and a heavily tatted Levine is now shirtless, trying to replicate the moves of Mick Jagger. Rumours suggested that the Rolling Stone had been approached to join the band on stage but thankfully, mercifully that didn;t work out.

Now there are fireworks and even more fire within the stadium and errmmmm, that’s it? Big Boi returned just for the applause and damn it, he should have down the whole show.

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Big Boi is here! Wrapped up in an extravagant fur coat, the Atlanta rapper literaly drove into the stadium to give a performance of Outkast classic The Way You Move. But with that, he’s gone (he’d better come back) and Levins is stripped down to a vest (probably also worried about that tracksuit fire).

So far, it has to be said, as welcome as the guests have been, their songs have felt a little tacked onto what is essentially a Maroon 5 tour date. Big Boi had better be coming back. Just reiterating.

Straight onto probably their biggest song to date, Girls Like You, without Cardi B who was approached to perform but refused out of loyalty to Colin Kaepernick. Instead, she’s been replaced by an impressive gospel choir, giving a played out song a new lease of life.

Back in time now and another undeniably catchy song - She Will Be Loved. Not so sure about everyone holding lanterns with inspirational words like, ermmm, “smile”. It’s all very #inspirational.

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Okay so I was wrong about that chronology as Travis Scott, introduced by Spongebob, has landed, I imagine for the first time ever on CBS. It’s a nice change of tone and it’s interesting hearing CBS try to deal with his swearing.

Oh but now Levine is bouncing around the stage next to him, like a confused dad waiting at a school disco. Scott has gone for a stage-dive which is a risk but more on that later.

There’s a lot of fire as well as Levine in a tracksuit top which is obviously a concern given the flammability but now This Love is being blasted out and, again, this really is a great pop song. It seems like there’s a chronology going on with the setlist which can only mean things are heading south.

Oh and the stage design is very, well, pedestrian compared to recent years. Which makes sense, given who’s performing.

Maroon 5 has arrived

The first half is over and some team is beating some team at something or something. But anyway less of that and more of some music with Adam Levine and pals here to entertain football fans grabbing a snack.

Weirdly introduced by Steve Carell (Pepsi’s new ad star), the band started with Harder to Breathe, a worthy reminder that they used to produce some craft pop earworms. It’s a rocky, well pop rocky start, that’s set to turn into hip-hop rather soon.

Cardi B
Cardi B Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Cardi B has now confirmed that she turned down an opportunity to perform with Maroon 5 in order to stand with Colin Kaepernick.

“My husband, he loves football,” she told AP. “His kids play football. It’s really hard for him … He really wants to go to the Super Bowl, but he can’t go to the Super Bowl, because he’s got to stand for something. You have to sacrifice that. I got to sacrifice a lot of money to perform. But there’s a man who sacrificed his job for us, so we got to stand behind him.”

In case you needed a reminder of Justin Timberlake’s “forgettable but flashy” performance from last year, well, here you go:

So Bud Light’s corn syrup ad didn’t, ahem, pop for everyone:

Carrie and The Dude eschew their drinks-of-choice

Very possibly the best ad of the night: Sarah Jessica Parker and Jeff Bridges appear in character (as Carrie Bradshaw and Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, respectively) and order glasses of Stella Artois, shocking a waitstaff that has already prepared Carrie a Cosmo and The Dude a White Russian. Very savvy of Stella to appeal to a TV show and a film with huge cult followings, though I remain chagrined they haven’t parodied A Streetcar Named Desire (even though others have thought of it).

The Twilight Zone

A rather nifty tease here of the new rebooted take on The Twilight Zone, arriving on CBS All Access later this year. It makes sense, with the game showing on CBS, that the channel would use this chance to promote their own goods but less predictable is how they chose to unveil the show. Hosted by Jordan Peele, the man himself appears in a creepily empty stadium before that familiar theme tune kicks in …

The ImWithKap hashtag, mentioned earlier in Ava DuVernary’s tweet has been trending today with other celebrities all choosing not get involved in this year’s game in support of Colin Kaepernick.

As well as DuVernay, Common, who provided a song for her MLK biopic Selma, has also shared this:

Adam Levine posted this tease of what we might be able to expect at halftime. A leather jacket is likely.

View this post on Instagram

Bet.

A post shared by Adam Levine (@adamlevine) on

“And people think I’m nuts”

It was not always the case that Super Bowl commercials live and die by compulsory celebrity cameos but apparently it is now: here, Charlie Sheen and Alex Rodriguez make blink-and-you-miss-it appearances for Planters Nuts, tactful in its ability to find perhaps the two (and-a-half, haha) most appealing men to a certain subset of America. The catchy, Super Bowl-appropriate #CrunchTime hashtag and the brief Ave Maria soundtrack both get stamps of approval.

Toyota co-opts an inspirational story

No Super Bowl commercial tradition is as tried-and-true as the one where an uber-corporation spends 30-40 seconds on a genuinely uplifting or galvanizing story and then, in a graceless pivot, tells us why their product is the car- or tech- or beer-equivalent of said story.

This ad for the Toyota Rav-4 starts with Antoinette “Toni” Harris, who last year received a scholarship to play college football at Bethany College and has said she hopes to be the first female NFL player. She is amazing, but the pivot to Toyota is laughably ham-fisted. Toni says she’s “never been a big fan of assumptions” and then Toyota man says “Neither have we!” and introduces “the hybrid that will shatter perceptions.” Honk if you like corporate feminism!

I mean ...

Bud Light x Game of Thrones

To quote Marvel, is this … the most ambitious crossover event in history? In their second ad of the night, Bud Light’s embrace of fire-breathing dragons and all things medieval is shown to be … a strange collab with HBO and Game of Thrones, who essentially hijacked the brand’s commercial to announce its forthcoming final season. A refreshing and surprising departure from some of the more run-of-the-mill adverts this evening.

Glinda the Good Witch hawks avocados

If you looked up from your bowl of guac you’ll have seen the lovely stage legend Kristin Chenoweth in an avocado commercial that is funny but extremely scatterbrained: it’s an extended riff on dog shows, but here the humans are the pets and are forced to keep their composure as they “compete for the ultimate prize: Avocados from Mexico.” The ones who can’t resist the avocado’s lure get dog-collar cones put on them; someone else uses the phrase “sniff the bum of victory.” But the main takeaway here is that I’ll buy anything Kristin Chenoweth is selling.

There’s a Pringles stack for everyone except Alexa!

Some dark, automation and AI-themed subtext to this Pringles ad, in which a couple o’ dudes extol the virtue of Pringles stacks (there are a whopping 318 flavor combinations, by the way) before an Alexa-like gadget announces she’ll “never know the joy of tasting any, for I have no hands to stack with, no mouth to taste with, no soul to feel with.” An effective commercial inasmuch as I was unaware Pringles had so many different flavors!

In case you really don’t want to watch the game, Guillermo del Toro is trying to tempt you away (teasers for a new film he’s producing are on the way)

Everyone knows a Cathy!

Very funny spot from T-Mobile, consisting of just a screenshot of a text from Cathy, who’s got a lot to get off her chest. “We’ll keep things brief,” reads the tagline. T-Mobile is apparently planning to run one ad per quarter, so there’s more where that came from.

And now trying to outdo Diddy who wore a memorably memorable fur coat at last year’s Super Bowl, here’s Jamie Foxx in a panda jumper

Jamie Foxx
Jamie Foxx Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP

Audi presents a cashew-induced dreamscape

The opening of Audi’s Super Bowl ad for its new line of e-cars is…an ode to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven? Maybe it wasn’t deliberate, but the mise-en-scène sure looks like the dreamy wheat fields where Richard Gere and Sam Shepard competed for Brooke Adams’ affections. Anyway, it lasts for only a few seconds before we pivot to the fancy car and then someone is administering the Heimlich and then there’s a projectile cashew that seems to suggest the man had fallen unconscious and dreamt of the new Audi vehicle. It is that rare car advert that doesn’t paint by the numbers, though.

Cardi and Carell for Pepsi

The great Steve Carell emits strong dad vibes in this solid Pepsi commercial, which also features Cardi B and Lil Jon and takes great pains to distinguish between the rappers’ similar tag lines: “Oh!-kay” (Jon) and “O-kurrr” (Cardi). But Pepsi is more than okay, they tell us, which is a rather tepid selling point vis-à-vis the Coca Cola commercial that aired before the game and more or less positioned Coke as the world’s eminent bridge-builder and problem-solver.

Bud Light Throws Shade

A shot across the bow from Bud Light, who’s coming for its rivals Miller and Coors with a Game of Thrones-themed advertisement about how beer is best brewed sans corn syrup. Putting aside the fact that Bud Light tastes like toilet water, that was a sharp and savage followup to their Bud Knight ad from 2018.

Expensify This

2 Chainz plays a rapper who’s filming a music video: on the hood of his futuristic convertible is a silver dish of hors d’oeuvres. Adam Scott is the label boss who says he needs paper receipts. But obviously 2 Chainz has Expensify for that!

Hobbs & Shaw

Just as you were about to scream into the sky, asking the heavens just why the Fast and Furious franchise hasn’t turned into an extended cinematic universe, your prayers have been answered. Given both the phenomenal success of the underdog motoring saga and The Rock’s continuing ascent, this was an inevitable step and for the first self-referential spin-off he’s joined by Jason Statham’s character for a Mission: Impossible-esque caper (even Fallout’s Vanessa Kirby is joining them). They’re pitted against Idris Elba’s superhuman bad guy as well as a ton of atrocious dialogue (“I’m what you’d call an ice cold can of whoop ass”) but predictably, it all looks rather fun.

Captain Marvel

While some studios have chosen to spend less cash teasing their new movies during the Super Bowl in recent years, here’s another sign that Marvel and Disney have little interest in doing the same. As well as sharing new footage from the final Avengers movie, there’s also a new look at Captain Marvel, the film that’s set to share a connection given Infinity War’s mysterious post-credits scene. It’s more of the same but further showcases that Brie Larson’s newly introduced character will be the most powerful superhero of them all.

Turkish Airlines

And there’s the 30-second version of Ridley Scott’s lush and much-hyped ad for Turkish Airlines, who’ve brought out big guns like Morgan Freeman for their Super Bowl ads the last several years. Starring Blade Runner 2049’s Sylvia Hoeks, the full six-minute version of can be found above.

#KillerSkin

Skincare brand Olay goes slasher for its #KillerSkin commercial, an extended riff on the Halloween movies, with a Michael Myers copycat to boot. Smart choice to recruit a battle-scarred horror veteran like Sarah Michelle Gellar for this one; utterly perplexing choice to recruit her and…not reference Buffy the Vampire Slayer? For that reason this otherwise killer commercial falls just short of receiving an olé.

Jason Bateman as an elevator operator

Kudos to Hyundai for this rather clever deployment of Jason Bateman’s ample charm. He plays an elevator attendant directing passengers to different floors of a building, or different circles of hell: the root canal floor, the jury duty floor, the middle seat, the talk (“your body’s changing, my body changed, even grandma’s body changed,” says dad.) Finally we reach the Hyundai floor, which looks like it was designed by Frank Gehry. I have no opinion on the merits of Hyundai cars but this is an effective ad.

The Handmaid’s Tale

Hoping to kick off some positive buzz for the third season of a show that really didn’t need a second season, Hulu has launched a splashy new teaser for The Handmaid’s Tale, returning all too soon. It starts out like a propaganda ad for a healthy new period for America before Offred enters, hinting at agency and revenge that she’s not been allowed for so long. “Wake up America, morning’s over,” she says and we hope that the second season lull will be following suit.

Updated

The Ball is in Your Court

Another great ad, this one with Serena Williams, who in burnishing her reputation as one of the five greatest American athletes of all time – another top-fiver’s on the field right now and his name appropriately rhymes with Shady – has in the last year appeared in commercials for Chase, Vogue, Nike, Gatorade, and Tempur-Pedic. I reckon her best partnership is the one that just aired, with dating app Bumble, which is premised on the idea that in matches between straight folks only women can facilitate conversation. As highlights from her illustrious career play, Serena narrates and encourages women to make the first move. “Don’t wait to be given power, because here’s what they won’t tell you,” she says. “You already have it.” A nice antidote to the manly, concussive bluster of the night’s main event.

Christina Applegate gives talking M&Ms a lift

It’s always a delight to see unjustly unsung comic genius Christina Applegate on screen, even if it’s in an M&Ms advert instead of the star vehicle she’s deserved (and been denied) for close to two decades. Here she gives us a kind of harried Veronica Corningstone vibe as she chauffeurs a trio of colorful, bickering M&Ms. Full disclosure: I thought this was a commercial for high-performance brake pads until the camera finally revealed our candy-colored passengers.

Avengers: Endgame

After seemingly endless online theorising post-Infinity War’s gobsmacker of an ending, Marvel released the first trailer for the follow-up last year to acclaim and yes, even more theorising. Tonight, more screengrabs will be studied with a second tease of the final Avengers film that’s a bit shorter than many would have hoped but does the job rather nicely. It’s a grief group-themed ad about refusing to move on and sees the survivors teaming up ready to find their missing friends. “Some people move on but not us,” Cap says, echoing a fanbase who will find it hard to say goodbye to these guys.

And here’s a snippet of her belting it out with ease:

A topical reaction to Gladys Knight’s performance!

Walmart

Getting in on a running theme of the evening’s advertisements, when seems to be pop culture references, Walmart’s latest has many, many vehicles, starting with the Batmobile before including the cars from Ghostbusters, Cars, Dumb and Dumber, Jurassic Park, Scooby-Doo, and Back To The Future. The idea is what they’re calling the Grocery Pickup Program, where groceries that you’ve ordered online are delivered to your parking spot. Yours truly has done a little digging and there is of course a $30 grocery minimum to be met in order to use the service.

Wonder Park

Hoping that its second amusement park movie within a year does a whole lot better than its last one (Johnny Knoxville’s misfiring Action Point), Paramount is giving a big push to this animated adventure. With age, these films often feel a bit like a fever dream and the trailer, involving some “chimpanzombies”, a British porcupine voiced by John Oliver and a fish carousel does give it a trippy feel. But a stacked voice cast, also including Kenan Thompson, Jennifer Garner, Mila Kunis and Matthew Broderick, and a script from the duo behind Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol suggests wondrous times ahead.

Empress of Soul Gladys Knight has just taken the stage, or the pitch to be more specific, with a rousing performance of the National Anthem. Video will be on the way soon but first here’s a look at the rather brilliant R&B duo Chloe x Halle providing a rather brilliant recital of America the Beautiful

In case you want to read more about that particular debate, here’s a reported feature:

Travis Scott
Travis Scott Photograph: Eric Christian Smith/AP

If you found last year’s half-time performance by Justin Timberlake to be a tad milquetoast then you might want to have a nap this year as Maroon 5 will be taking the stage.

It’s a controversial choice given that tonight’s game is in Atlanta and there’s been understandable frustration that the whitest of white pop acts ever has been chosen to represent the city. To make up for that, there will be cameos from Travis Scott and Big Boi and lead singer Adam Levine insists that it will be a history-making performance.

“This is the show that will have the biggest hip-hop presence that there has ever been on the show,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “I mean, I can’t look back and find that to be the case before.”

One of the night’s most anticipated trailers is for Avengers: Endgame and while there were question marks over whether or not it might be showing, this looks like proof to us (either that or the Russos are super big SMILF fans)

Random Super Bowl group photo alert!

Jon Bon Jovi, CEO of the New England Patriots Robert Kraft, and Kevin Hart.
Jon Bon Jovi, CEO of the New England Patriots Robert Kraft, and Kevin Hart. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage

Tonight’s National Anthem will be performed by Atlanta’s own Gladys Knight, who has come under some fire for her decision to be involved.

Colin Kaepernick’s lawyer Mark Geragos referred to any performer being involved tonight as “crossing an intellectual picket line” but in her defence, Knight explained that she believes she is helping bring everyone together.

Selma director Ava DuVernay is one of many celebrities giving the game a wide berth tonight over what she calls the “racist treatment” of former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Her tweet was then quote-tweeted by the man himself:

It's non-game time

Maroon 5’s Adam Levine
Maroon 5’s Adam Levine Photograph: NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Excited about the Super Bowl but not so bothered about the actual, ya know, Super Bowl element of it? Fear not, this liveblog will be focused on everything that happens tonight outside of the actual game itself.

There’ll be celebrities in attendance bragging about it on the gram, brands unveiling splashy new star-studded ads, studios sharing new footage from some of the summer’s biggest movies and Maroon 5 performing with some very special guests.

If you do want to check out the score then please head over here but otherwise stick with us for everything else.

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