2026 Super Bowl: 5 Worst Commercials, Ranked

You know the drill by now, right? Every year, brands pay enormous amounts of money so that they can air ads during the Super Bowl, the biggest televised event of ... well, any given year. There are plenty of people, myself included, who routinely tune in to see the ads and the halftime show (shout out to this year's headliner, Bad Bunny) and ignore the football game bookending those events. Each year, there are some standout commercials, but I'm not here to talk about those. No, folks — I'm here to talk about the total duds.

My colleague right here at /Film, Ben Pearson, already went long on why XFinity's bizarrely de-aged "Jurassic Park" spot absolutely sucks, and for that reason and that reason alone, that ad is not on this list. (It would have been otherwise, but it got its very own spotlight, so to speak.) With that in mind, here are five of the dumbest, most annoying, or even creepiest ads airing during the 2026 Super Bowl ... and fair warning! The majority of them involve artificial intelligence, because of course they do.

For a while now, Uber Eats has tasked the Oscar-winning Matthew McConaughey with a really, really terrible bit. The bit in question? He's convinced that football is nothing more than an elaborate ruse to trick people into buying food, sort of like how people sometimes say that Valentine's Day was created by Hallmark to sell greeting cards. McConaughey, bless his heart, sells this absolutely witless premise as best as he can, and in this minute-long Uber Eats commercial — which feels like it lasts for at least 10 — he's trying to convince Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper that his conspiracy is right.

Cooper — a man after my heart, because we are both Philadelphia natives who support the Eagles, go Birds — barely even tries in this commercial. Seriously, he's phoning it in, and honestly? I respect it because he was probably paid quite a lot for this irritating ad. Even Parker Posey, whom I love unabashedly, can't save this wholly annoying commercial. "Football isn't selling food," Cooper says, exasperated, to McConaughey. "You cannot keep this up." Folks, he's right. Uber Eats, did you hear him?

In a world where artificial intelligence is slowly invading every single aspect of our daily lives — including but not limited to Hollywood creating an actress formed using AI named Tilly Norwood — I, personally, don't like to be reminded of this. That's too bad, though, because there are a bunch of AI-centered ads airing during the 2026 Super Bowl, and this ad for Anthropic is just one of them.

Why is it so bad? Well, a guy doing pull-ups asks AI — in human form, for whatever reason — how quickly he can possibly get six-pack abs. The way the AI "guy" — whom I can only assume is a manifestation of Claude, the chat agent created and run by Anthropic — smiles is, frankly, burned into my brain forever, and the ad does not get less unsettling from there. The point of the ad, though, is the real crime here: it's using a freaky-deaky AI "person" to announce that, as an AI chat agent service, Claude won't ever feature ads. Uh, great? I guess?!

Do you cherish the idea of creating memories with your child, but feel like you need an AI chatbot to do that for you? If that's the case, I guess this ad for Google Gemini might be right up your alley. In voiceover, a mother and child — I cannot personally confirm if this is true, but the child voice certainly sounds like it was made using artificial intelligence, which I suppose would be pretty apt — discuss the child's room in their house, and they use Gemini to paint the walls blue and place the dog bed like they're creating a dwelling in a Sims house.

This 30-second spot doesn't initially feel that bad or unsettling, but it points to a larger issue: it's becoming more and more common for people to ask AI chatbots to perform basic tasks that humans are perfectly capable of doing, and if you can't imagine a blue room — or, god forbid, just go ahead and paint it — that seems troubling to me. Plus, there's the added ick of bringing a kid into the mix who will grow up asking Gemini to write their college essays, if they keep relying on it to that extent.

In outlets like The Hollywood Reporter, we learned that Svedka, a popular vodka brand, created the first-ever Super Bowl ad entirely made using artificial intelligence. Yeah, guys — we can tell! From the very first moments of this ad, where a female robot knocks on the "camera" to greet us, I felt terrified and, if I can be vulnerable with all of you, shaken to my very core. Then the robots make drinks with Svedka and have a little dance. Worse still, THR reported that a 23-year-old TikToker named Jessica Rizzardi created said little dance, only for it to be ... fed into a machine and performed by pretend robots.

How much clearer must I be? Stop doing this. Nothing in this commercial looks good or has any artistic merit. I personally don't even like vodka, but if I did? I probably would pledge to never buy Svedka again. 

For some reason, model and Kardashian offspring Kendall Jenner keeps appearing in commercials, despite the utterly disastrous Pepsi spot that made her into an international laughing stock in 2017. This time, she's shilling for Fanatics Sportsbook, one of the many online sports gambling sites that have popped up in recent years. The whole premise — besides simply reminding you that Jenner is very beautiful and very rich — is that she can tell you how to "bet on" the right things like men because she's learned the hard way, as have her famous sisters. The twist? She dates basketball players and then bets on them to lose, because any NBA star she hooks up with is immediately cursed by her mere existence.

As Jenner boards a private jet in front of a Ferrari with a license plate that reads "KURS3D," you might feel like you're losing your mind. (I did!) Not only is sports gambling a highly addictive and highly controversial subject, to say the least, but Jenner isn't exactly a winning or relatable saleswoman, and even her joking at her own expense falls utterly flat. It's not quite as bad as her half-sister Kim Kardashian's performance on the dreadful series "All's Fair," but it's not far off either!