Ranking the best and worst Super Bowl commercials of 2026: From dinosaurs to tight ends and toilet jokes

For modern-day Don Drapers, the Super Bowl is, well, their Super Bowl. The NFL finale is by far the biggest day on the advertising calendar, where a 30-second commercial on NBC generally costs around $8 million and some prime slots change hands for $10 million. Those eye-watering fees are all to do with the massive audience tuning in to watch both the game itself and the high-profile halftime show. Last year, the Super Bowl broke its own record to become the highest-rated broadcast in United States television history, rivaled only by the moon landing. The game itself was watched by an average of 127.7 million viewers, with that figure rising to 133.5 million when Kendrick Lamar came out at halftime. It’s been predicted that Bad Bunny could draw even more eyeballs.

It’s no surprise then that advertisers go all out to create star-studded commercials they hope will capture the imagination of viewers and make those exorbitant booking fees worthwhile. This year, there’s one man they’ve been turning to more than any other: Taika Waititi. The New Zealand-born Jojo Rabbit director has become the MVP of Super Bowl commercials, with no fewer than three separate big-budget campaigns under his creative control in 2026.

Most prominently, he directed and plays a therapist in Pepsi’s “The Choice,” in which a CGI polar bear realizes in a blind taste test that he prefers Pepsi to Coca-Cola. He also directed a version of Jurassic Park for internet provider Xfinity, where everything works out fine, and for Lay’s, made a heart-warming commercial about a father and daughter potato farming that serves as a follow-up to a similar advertisement he made for them last year about family farms. The 50-year-old once claimed he took the job directing Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok because he “was poor,” but it’s safe to assume his bank balance is looking a little healthier now.

He’s not the only star set to make a well-compensated, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in between stoppages at this year’s Super Bowl. Here are some of the biggest and best commercials of the year, along with a few that didn’t quite hit the mark:

Spike Jonze has a history with the Super Bowl. Back in 2002, the same year he directed the mind-bending Charlie Kaufman-penned classic Adaptation, Jonze was also behind a 30-second clip for Levi’s titled “Crazy Legs” that featured a dancer in a pair of Levi’s Flyweight jeans strutting to Mexican hip-hop group Control Machete’s “Si Señor.” This year, he’s back with a spot for Instacart that sees Ben Stiller (in full Zoolander mode) and famously flip-happy pop star Benson Boone playing a pair of brothers in a retro European disco-pop band. After Boone pulls off one of his signature backflips, Stiller repeatedly attempts to outdo him from ever-greater heights with increasingly painful and dangerous results. It’s Stiller’s way-too-committed performance that sells the whole thing, and the result is, as the tagline puts it, “Bananas just how you like.”

There’s a pretty sound concept behind internet provider Xfinity’s Super Bowl campaign this year: What if Jurassic Park had just worked? Waititi’s commercial cuts together footage of Richard Attenborough and Samuel L. Jackson from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster with new scenes of a purple-shirted wireless tech simply plugging in a new router and solving all their problems. That sets up an endearing montage of a de-aged Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum enjoying the dinosaur attractions trouble-free, which would be even better if it weren’t for the fact that de-aging technology still leaves a little to be desired. Neill, in particular, is rendered rubber-faced and decidedly in the uncanny valley. Still, it’s fun to see him ride a triceratops carousel. Meanwhile, the moment Goldblum gets to the seafood buffet and says: “That’s one big pile of shrimp...”, referencing his line about dinosaur dung in the original movie, is certainly not the only toilet reference to be deployed this Super Bowl season...

William Shatner, who is 94 years old, is living proof that you’re never too old to make a poop joke. (And, as Nikki Glaser joked about Steve Martin and Martin Short at the Golden Globes a few weeks ago, that in this industry you’re never too old to still need money.) After first appearing in a Star Trek-like command center, Shatner teleports around the United States, reminding unsuspecting civilians to eat fiber-rich Raisin Bran to ensure regular trips to the toilet. This is, of course, a setup for lots of crude wordplay using an abbreviated version of Shatner’s name: “Will Shat in the house,” “Will Shat on a car”, “Will Shat... every damn day,” and so forth. “Wait, Will Shat where?” comes the response in the extended version. Does imagining William Shatner taking a dump somewhere unexpected in your house make you want to eat breakfast cereal? Kellogg's is betting a lot of money it does. Will this be the last butt-related joke in a Super Bowl commercial? Not even close.

This year’s Super Bowl commercials continue their surprising race to the (literal) bottom with this Novartis campaign to promote a “finger-free” PSA (prostate-specific antigen) blood test that can screen for prostate cancer in men. It’s the rare Super Bowl commercial that actually features NFL players, with well-known Tight Ends including Rob Gronkowski, George Kittle, Tony Gonzalez, Greg Olsen, Colby Parkinson, Delanie Walker and Vernon Davis all seen chilling out, while former coach Bruce Arians, a prostate cancer survivor himself, explains that thanks to the new blood test, men can now relax their tight ends. A silly pun it may be, but at least it’s for a good cause: A staggering one in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, so anything that encourages more to get themselves checked out can only be a good thing.

We’ve seen Ben Stiller use his deranged commitment to the bit to help Instacart flog bananas — now witness Andy Samberg go terrifyingly bonkers in the service of Hellman’s mayonnaise. The idea of a character called “Meal Diamond” singing a version of “Sweet Caroline” rewritten as “Sweet Sandwich Time” could have been as bland and forgettable as, well, mayonnaise, but in the hands of the former Saturday Night Live and Brooklyn 99 star, he becomes memorably twisted. It’s fun to imagine Samberg pitching the details to Hellmann’s head office: “He lives in the walls of the deli and never changes his clothes. He doesn’t know who his parents are. He can only leave if someone marries him and breaks ‘the curse,’ yet he’s happy when Elle Fanning rejects him.” Sure, Andy. We’re only paying a quarter of a million dollars a second to air this, why not?

There is admittedly something pleasingly audacious about the idea of Pepsi taking Coca-Cola’s polar bear spokesman and having him decide in a blind taste test that he’s actually preferred Pepsi all along, but to have the whole thing conclude with the polar bear couple caught on a big screen at a concert feels both clunky and several months past whenever that joke stopped being funny.

They certainly didn’t scrimp on the big-name celebrities, but sadly, with all that attention on the star wattage of Jon Hamm, Scarlett Johansson and Bowen Yang, it seems nobody on “Ritz Island” bothered to write any jokes. Johansson’s delivery of the line: “It’s party time” (complete with shoulder shimmy) is so cringe-worthy that she must be praying this commercial never becomes popular enough for it to become a meme.

Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos have one of the most creative, productive and impressive star-director relationships in Hollywood. Since 2018, they’ve made four brilliant films together, The Favourite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness and this year’s Best Picture-nominee Bugonia, so when website platform Squarespace hired the pair, they presumably thought they were in safe hands. Sadly, watching Stone repetitively scream and smash laptops in frustration while trapped on a dark and moody island is neither entertaining nor much of an endorsement that Squarespace will help you solve your domain-name-related issues.

Yorgos Lanthimos has been almost as busy as Taika Waititi ahead of this Super Bowl. Here, he puts the old school movie star charm of George Clooney to work promoting Grubhub. That’s the idea, anyway, but his depiction of a gallery of grotesques seated around a banquet table demanding “Who will eat the fees?” might be enough to put viewers off not just using delivery services, but maybe the entire concept of ever having dinner again.

While some of this year’s most entertaining Super Bowl commercials managed to err just on the right side of toilet humour, Manscaped comes along with something truly gross: singing clumps of hair scattered across a bathroom floor. Eww. Hope nobody was planning on eating anything during the Super Bowl!