Garden Snaps: Super Bowl Ads & The Future Of The Next 20 Minutes
If you’re still talking about the Super Bowl ads, it’s probably not because of the usual celebrity nostalgia bait. Every year, brands bring back 90s icons and sitcom reunions to keep older football fans engaged.
That’s the standard playbook.
Same with high-budget VFX—big game ads have always flexed their CGI budgets to grab attention.
But something different is happening.
A new AI style is emerging, and Instacart’s ad might be the best example. It was a rapid-fire barrage of brand mascots—Pillsbury Doughboy, the Old Spice Guy, Kool-Aid Man, Energizer Bunny, Chester Cheetah, Mr. Clean—colliding in a way that felt less like a traditional commercial and more like an algorithm-fed fever dream.
It wasn’t polished; it was overstimulating. And it worked.
That was the real theme last night—ads that felt like a TikTok scroll. Messy, trippy, unconcerned with high-end VFX but obsessed with randomness and hyper-speed cuts. It’s an aesthetic born from AI-generated weirdness and meme culture.
It’s not about making things look real anymore. It’s about making them feel viral.
Everything is shifting so fast that even trying to predict where it’s headed feels pointless.
One new tool, one viral moment, and the entire landscape can change overnight. But the trend is already clear: AI-driven content is seeping into everything. Social media creators are running with it, making weirder, more abstract visuals as the tools get cheaper and more accessible. What used to require a full VFX team is now available to anyone with time, curiosity, and a $30-a-month subscription.
We will see more and more quick made short form TV series implementing the latest tools. We will see features doing the same. And this content wont need to pipe through the walled garden to get there.
This shift won’t replace traditional storytelling, but it will challenge it. So what do filmmakers coming from traditional media do?
Here are my gut reactions:
It’s only going to get weirder. As AI tools become more accessible, more people will use them. The more that happens, the harder innovators will push to stand out. Absurdity will keep escalating.
Chasing these trends is a fool’s errand. Traditional movie making takes 18 months (on a really good day) from concept to release. By the time a movie chasing this aesthetic hits the market, audiences will be exhausted.
The more we push absurdity, the more realism will stand out. A film like Anora makes sense now—not because it’s reactionary, but because it feels handcrafted. The more artificial content gets, the more audiences will crave something grounded.
Sci-fi and fantasy will struggle more. When AI and social media generate endless fantastical visuals at lightning speed, spectacle starts to feel cheap. That makes it even harder for original sci-fi and fantasy projects to break through.
Action movies need to lean into real stunts. If everything in social media is AI-generated chaos, the best way to sell action films is to double down on what feels real. Even if enhanced by VFX, the marketing has to highlight practical effects, human skill, and hand-crafted spectacle. (Hello, Tom Cruise.) The more over-fabricated everything else gets, the more audiences will crave something tangible.
However—if I were a movie distributor, I’d be on the lookout for the first breakout AI-driven fast feature and move fast to get it to market.
The key?
Finding creators with a built-in community that can fuel a lightning-fast marketing push.
Some kid is going to invent the next Star Wars in their bedroom, using what, in the moment, will feel like mind-blowing VFX.
I’d love to see someone from the walled gardens—A24, Paper Airplane, or anyone with taste and guts— to take a swing at this before the media cycle moves on. It’s not a long-term strategy, but a few well-placed bets could generate real money and open the door for more.
And meanwhile—filmmakers must be learning the AI tools. Learn about it, even if just to ignore it later. We all need to keep up with the tools. Eric Barmack writes a great column for The Ankler that’s a solid resource for tracking these shifts as they emerge. Check him out.