New ‘F9’ Super Bowl Ad Presumes You Saw Last Year’s ‘F9’ Super Bowl Spot

In a cruel twist of fate, F9 becomes the first movie to get two Super Bowl commercials in two different Super Bowls.

It appears that so far Universal’s F9 will be the only big Super Bowl spot that’ll essentially be a run-run from last Super Bowl. Sonic the Hedgehog and Mulan have already been released, while A Quiet Place part II and No Time to Die have been pushed to Fall. It’s now the first movie to be teased at two consecutive Super Bowl games. We’ll see if Disney offers another Black Widow commercial, although I think they’re missing an opportunity if they don’t plug Cruella during the Puppy Bowl.

No matter, there’s extraordinarily little to this F9 commercial other than the fact that A) it’s another F9 commercial, B) it offers not “coming May 28” but rather “coming soon” and C) it kinda presumes you’ve already seen the previous trailer and Super Bowl ad that dropped this time last year. I’d like to say that Universal spending whatever it cost to run a pre-game ad (presumably a lot less than a $5.5 million in-game commercial) means they are sure that F9 will open theatrically this Memorial Day weekend.

But everything is in flux and the “coming soon to theaters” tag at the end implies that, well, it’s a coin toss. Yes, Asia (especially China, Japan and India) seem to be rolling along nicely, but there’s only so much global downturn that Universal can justify for a film that likely would have coasted to $1 billion worldwide had it opened last May under conventional circumstances. The pre-game spot is less a shot called than a tradition (in terms of Fast Saga flicks hawking themselves at the Super Bowl) maintained.

Moreover, the two big reveals from the first theatrical trailer and subsequent Super Bowl ad, that Jon Cena was playing Dom’s evil brother and that Sung Kang’s Han Lue is inexplicably back from the dead after getting side-swiped and blown up in Tokyo Drift (and subsequently, in terms of continuity, in Furious 7). Both developments are included sans any context in this new spot, so anyone watching this commercial who hasn’t seen the previous ads (and hasn’t done the reading) is going to be a little confused.

We talk about sequels that presume you’ve seen the previous film, but this is a Super Bowl ad that presumes you’ve seen last year’s Super Bowl ad. As far as this ad, there’s a lot of action for Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty and a few shots of Jordana Brewster’s Mia. We have a shot of the whole family/cast sitting around the barbeque with an empty chair seemingly meant for Paul Walker’s Bryan. Whether Bryan will just be on a business trip or taking his kids to visit his side of the family is an open question.

Anyway, Justin Lin’s F9 will (hopefully) open May 28, 2021. It stars Vin Diesel, Jon Cena, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren, Nathalie Emmanuel and Sung Kang. As always, we’ll see.