Ranking the 15 Best Super Bowl Commercials of 2026

The Super Bowl might be the biggest entertainment event of the year, and the game itself is increasingly just a part of the overall package.

For a lot of non-football fans, the commercials are the big draw.

That's a key thing to remember as we run down the top ads from this year's big game: This is entertainment, and we want to enjoy what we're watching.

This is bad news for any company that opts for earnestness. Anything heartfelt will get you no points here, and effectively amounts to setting $8-10 million dollars on fire. We want jokes, we want irreverence, and we want as much general silliness and nonsense as possible.

Do not try to inspire, uplift or otherwise engage in anything approaching seriousness. We're all 14 wings, six slices of pizza and several handfuls of chips deep. We are not in the mood for sincerity.

15. Not the Best, But Good Enough

Tim Robinson could sit quietly for 30 seconds doing nothing, and it would have gotten him into the countdown. This is a subjective list, which is good for you to know up front.

I'm not sure what percentage of the population laughed at "This city's been nothing but nasty to me." It's probably a single-digit number, but I'm firmly in that devoted minority.

Last year, a Robinson and Sam Richardson-led Totino's Pizza Rolls commercial featuring an alien called Chazmo "won" these rankings, and it wasn't close. This year's Robinson entry doesn't come close to clearing that bar, but there was no way this ad was getting shut out of the top 15.

14. Goats and GOATS

If you're going to include Chingy in a commercial, you'd better make sure he says "right thurr" at some point. They made sure to check that box early.

The bigger-picture concern here is that an actual goat seems to be encouraging goat consumption by being part of an ad that implores you to "Eat the GOAT." Even if GOAT is actually a nod to Frank's RedHot being the greatest of all time (highly debatable), it's very much open to interpretation.

This is very reckless behavior by a goat, whose ability to speak and rap suggests he's smart enough to know better.

13. Was the Can Invisible?

It takes some real ingenuity to build a man out of Pringles, but we can't all just stand here and ignore the biggest oversight in construction history. Sabrina Carpenter is many things, but a respectable architect is not one of them.

Why build the man out of chips? The can is sitting right there, and everyone knows that a) the cylindrical container for Pringles is far more iconic than the chips themselves, and b) it's roughly one million times more durable than the snack it contains. The chip man falls apart at every turn. If she'd only built him out of the cans, everything would have been fine. That's to say nothing of freshness, which the can preserves.

Do structural integrity and crispness mean nothing to her?

12. Polar Bears and Identity Crises Sell Soft Drinks

Taika Waititi cashes in with a Pepsi spot here, directing an ad that works well until a closing "Coldplay couple" reference casts a pall of laziness over the whole deal.

Prior to that, we get a polar bear (easily the ursine variety most associated with Coca Cola) choosing Pepsi in a blind taste test and then wrestling with WHAT IT ALL MEANS. He accidentally smashes the couch in his therapist's office (Waititi is the therapist), which is good for two or three comedy points.

I bumped on the polar bear walking down a crowded street, stopping to look forlornly through a restaurant window at a group of humans eating pizza and drinking Pepsi. Is nobody concerned that a polar bear is roaming the neighborhood? Generally speaking, these people are not taking the threat of dismemberment very seriously.

11. Art Is Commerce Now

I'm not sure how I feel about commercials being "elevated," but you have to concede Oscar-nominated director Yorgos Lanthimos and Oscar-winner Emma Stone combine to produce a pretty artsy-feeling (that's a technical term) ad for Squarespace.

It's black and white!

It has close-ups of eyeballs!

It uses upward, off-kilter angles to enhance the dramatics!

The destruction of all those laptops lets you know money was not an object here. And if you take one thing away from this, it's that good art has to be expensive and aired on television during a sports game. Bonus points for a staged behind-the-scenes bit that might actually be better than the commercial itself.

10. Taxes and Adrien Brody Are Very Serious

This is a superior black-and-white entry because it chases the overt seriousness with a full-color "we're in on the joke" admission from Academy Award winner Adrien Brody, who exclaims, "If there's no drama, there's no Adrien Brody."

Yet again, the mockumentary-style extended cut is better than the ad itself.

"At least death only happens to you once" is also a good encapsulation of the general feeling toward tax season.

One note, though: The person who yells, "cut!" is clearly the director of the ad, but somehow we're supposed to believe he doesn't know why there's rain. Who's even in charge here, guy? Did you not know there'd be rain? What did you think all those grips and teamsters were doing when they rigged up a giant set of pipes and turned the water on? That must have taken hours.

Get control of your set.

9. It Was About Food All Along

It's an interesting stretch to cast Matthew McConaughey as a high-strung chatterbox, considering his defining characteristic is a high level of chill. He has none here as he tries desperately to convince Bradley Cooper that football has actually been about food all along.

This is an expensive commercial with a ridiculous premise. Football is about football, not food. And if you're reading this while suffering from a post-Super Bowl tummy ache induced by the ingestion of 5,000 calories, made up mostly of cheeses, malted beverages and spiced meats, well…OK, maybe McConaughey was right.

Does anybody know who Cooper's favorite football team is? It's a little unclear here...

8. Invisible Cowboy Ski Races

Nobody's reinventing the wheel here. From Mr. Miyagi to Master Splinter to Yoda, we're familiar with the sage, slightly mystical mentor figure.

Still, if you're going to dip into that well, Kurt Russell is a pretty good get. Gravel-voiced gravitas is what you want in a teacher. It's also an admittedly new twist to have that figure teach someone to ski better so he can quit paying for everyone's beer all the time.

Lewis Pullman quickly finds himself in a wacky training montage orchestrated by Russell, whose best line is "If you rely on sight, you're already blind." This is terrible advice for someone who's going to have to ski down a hill very fast. You definitely need to rely on sight for that.

Anyway, Gregory (Pullman) beats his friends down the hill and gets a free beer out of it. 

7. Meal Diamond Is a Good Start

You start with a name like Meal Diamond, add Andy Samberg's knack for comedically-delivered loneliness and you're guaranteed a fairly high floor.

Important question: Does mayonnaise really need to advertise? What percentage of the population is unaware of it?

Is there some confusion about how to apply it to sandwiches?

Just asking, because it kind of seems like we're all pretty well caught up on the existence and proper use of condiments. And if that's a misapprehension, I guess we can expect ketchup and mustard to drop their own star-studded song parodies next year.

6. If Thor Is Vulnerable, So Are We All

All we should take from this ad for Alexa+ is that AI is going to kill us, and the only question is whether it will do that before or after it sets us up with a massage and a cinnamon scrub.

If the goal here was to minimize the perceived threat of AI by cooking up fantastical situations to highlight their implausibility, well...mission not accomplished. I hadn't even thought of my internet-connected garage door trying to decapitate me. And while I would welcome the various problems that might be associated with a really nice pool that has an automatic cover, the one I'd like to avoid is its apparent desire to drown me.

I didn't even know how much I had to be worried about. Maybe I should ask Alexa how to cope with existential dread.

5. Jurassic Park, But Safe

The face-smoothing technology that de-ages actors is still creepy in that uncanny valley kind of way, but the idea that solid wi-fi could have averted all the carnage at Jurassic Park is good enough to get past Sam Neill's eerily youthful look.

Plus, we get Jeff Goldblum being quirkily seductive, which is like watching Kevin Durant shooting a pull-up mid-ranger. It always works, and you feel like you're seeing someone existing in their most perfect natural state.

While we're using modern products to change the course of '90s movies, what about Google Maps pointing out the iceberg way in advance so Titanic is like two hours shorter? Or maybe self-driving technology making it pretty easy to solve the "someone has to steer the bus" problem in Speed. Just spit-balling.

4. Hitting for the American Cycle: Eagles, Farmers, Horses and Beer

You get two chords of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" before an actual baby bird emerges from beneath a log. You already know this is a Budweiser commercial because there's a Clydesdale colt on screen, which means you also know beyond any doubt that baby bird is guaranteed to grow up and become a bald eagle.

It's an absolute given.

Even knowing that, you can sympathize with the farmer who is definitely not crying while watching the adult Clydesdale and eagle become best friends.

Let's just ignore the trash parenting by the eagle's mom and dad, who apparently abandoned him during a rainstorm.

3. Billy Bass' Bitter End

A great ad sparks questions. Here's one:

First, what kind of parenting is happening in this household? The kid has got to be close to 10 years old, and he thinks a singing plastic fish mounted to a piece of wood is not only a real animal, but one capable of swimming?

This is a failure of fatherly leadership. Jeep may have a five-star crash safety rating, but good parenting exposes children to at least a few hard knocks. In other words, you don't need to indulge your fifth-grader by driving him out into the country to see if a fake fish can swim. Just tell him it's not alive. He can take it.

At least then, the (hilariously) dark turn that involves the fish being disemboweled by a bear could have been avoided.

2. Holy Shat!

Is this a juvenile idea that amounts to variations on the same scatological joke, or is it a valuable public service announcement about Raisin Bran's effect on regularity?

Yes.

Other than a potential missed opportunity to have William Shatner say certain cereals can help you "boldly go" or shouting "BRAAAAN!!!!" (except it sounds like KHAAAN!), this ad gets the job done.

Look, Shatner is 94 years old. We should all be so lucky to make it that long without losing our comedic timing or deadpan delivery. He's the MVP, even if there's a good chance everyone watching under the age of 60 might be a little fuzzy on who he is. A fun game would be convincing your younger relatives that he invented Raisin Bran and also played Darth Vader.

1. Sweet Gary!

Benson Boone figured out that people enjoy pop stars as much as they enjoy gymnastic feats, and he gets more mileage out of that surprising truth here.

Ironically, one mark of a good ad is that you forget what the product is because you're being entertained, and Boone's pairing with Ben Stiller achieves that by building a world where Italian accents, a man's struggle with paternal rejection and dancing fruit co-exist. There's a lot going on here, and you'd be forgiven for having no idea what you're being sold.

The lesson here seems to be that Instacart can give you bananas however you like them. And also that only a fool enters a backflip contest against Benson Boone.