Super Bowl 2026 ads: Ben Affleck, Jen Aniston, Jurassic Park, Emma Stone, Chris Hemsworth front costly spots

Beyond the half-time show and the football, the Super Bowl is also a veritable feast for celebrity watchers thanks to the annual tradition of star-fronted ads.

The cost of a 30-second Super Bowl this year is reportedly around $US8 million, which is actually about the same price as last year (inflation hasn’t hit everything). That’s still an insane amount of money to pay but with the game rating more than 100 million viewers, the cost per eyeball ratio probably works out OK.

That price tag is only for the ad time, there’s also the cost of production and, more often than not, cutting a huge cheque for the celebrities that have become a signature feature.

This year is no different with a cavalcade of famouses cashing in on getting paid big time to humiliate themselves a little, some more than others.

Ben Affleck has for several years been the Super Bowl spokesperson for Dunkin Donuts and he returns again this year, but with a bunch of 90s-era American sitcom stars. The minute-long ad is set inside a Bostonian Dunkin outlet, and is purportedly an alternative version of Good Will Hunting, and this time Affleck is Will.

He’s surrounded by a raft of CGI de-aged comedy performers including Friends’ Jennifer Aniston and Matt LeBlanc, Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander, Cheers’ Ted Danson, A Different World’s Jasmine Guy, Family Matters’ Jaleel White, Fresh Prince’s Alfonso Ribeiro, with a cameo from former Mr Gisele Bundchen, Tom Brady (he also played football).

They’re not the only ones getting de-aged. The Jurassic Park crew of Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum were also smoothed out to reprise their roles in an ad for telco Xfinity, in a what if “the fences didn’t fail” scenario.

It’s cute that the Americans are still trying to convince people that their mass-produced domestic beer is something worth drinking, but hey, patriotism works in mysterious ways. Bud Light’s ad has Post Malone, Peyton Manning and Shane Gillis chasing after a runaway keg.

Still on the beer front, Michel Lob Ultra’s ad features Lewis Pullman and Kurt Russell as a guy hopeless at skiing and a mysterious mentor who helps him to greatly up his game so that he doesn’t have to pick up the tab for everyone anymore.

The weird thing is that Pullman isn’t playing himself, but some dude called Greg, and Russell, well, he could be himself, or he could be guardian beer angel. They paid Maverick and F1’s Joseph Kosinski to direct it.

Emma Stone reteamed with her frequent filmmaking collaborator Yorgos Lanthimos for a bunch of ads for Squarespace, all built around the concept of her anguish of not owning her domain name.

The main ad is a black-and-white German Expressionist-inspired creation in which she repeats the cycle of discovering her disappointment, destroying a computer in anguish, rollerblading down a hallway and starting again. It’s on theme for the signature weirdness of Stone and Lanthimos’ projects including Poor Things.

If you actually go to emmastone.com, it hosts another video in which she directly addresses the viewer.

There’s an ad for Raisin Bran using a play in William Shatner’s name, shortening his moniker to Will Shat so that someone can yell out “Will Shat on a car!”. Get it. Keep it regular, with bran. The nonagenarian is a good sport about, teleporting himself from place to place with a cereal box.

Guy Fieri does a Bosch brand ad in which he morphs from regular guy to Guy! Normie dude is all about the button-up shirt, chinos and brown hair, but if you use Bosch, then you get to be special and cool. There’s a cute dog.

Chris Hemsworth (and wife Elsa Pataky) appears in an ad for Alexa+, Amazon’s virtual assistant. She’s the long-suffering wife, listening to her husband’s supposed paranoia about how AI will plot to kill him, running through a series of scenarios which, if we’re honest, actually seem quite plausible.

Like, Alexa closing the pool cover while he’s swimming, trapping and drowning him (which is half a plot from a Elsbeth episode), closing the garage door on his head or sending him a bear to maul him to death. It’s not going to sell anyone on Alexa not being a homicidal machine, but we would watch that movie.

Not be outdone by Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman plays a tap-dancing neighbour in an ad for vitamin supplements. Melissa McCarthy appears in a telenovela-inspired ad for Elf cosmetics with Nicholas Gonzalez (you may remember him as the hot pool boy D.J. in The OC).

There was also William Fichter for Bueno, Sofia Vergara for Skechers, Andy Samberg for Hellman’s, Brian Baumgartner for Ramp, Jon Hamm, Bowen Yang and Scarlett Johansson for Ritz, George Clooney for Grubhub, Ben Stiller and Benson Boone for Instacart, Bradley Cooper and Matthew McConaughey for UberEats, Hailee Steinfeld and Jon Bon Jovi for State Farm, Sabrina Carpenter for Pringles and Adrien Brody for TurboTax.