The Super Bowl 2023: Rihanna’s Halftime Show, A Breaking Bad Cameo Advertisement, New Movie Trailers… and football

Mar 6

Edited by Lianne Lee

The Super Bowl is an American sporting event in which the two finalists of the National Football League play against each other, determining the Champions of the National Football League, and is often accompanied by advertisements and live entertainment, making it a significant pop-culture event.

This year, the super bowl was hosted at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. The two competing teams were the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, with the Kansas City Chiefs winning by 3 points after a field goal kicked by Harrison Butker and the Chief’s quarterback Patrick Mahomes being named the MVP, completing 21 of 27 passes for 182 yards and also three touchdowns.

*The winning field goal of the 2023 Super Bowl, scored by Harrison Butker*
*Photograph: Caitlin O’Hara/Reuters*

Other than Football, one of the most prominent events of the Super Bowl 2023 was its Halftime Show (a traditional musical performance happening at Halftime during the Super Bowl, involving one or more performing artists, for example, last year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show featured Snoop Dog, Dr Dre, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, and Mary J. Blige, and past years featured other artists such as Bruno Mars, Maroon 5, and Travis Scott). This Year’s halftime show featured Rihanna, marking her return from a seven-year performing hiatus, in which she performed many of her hits, such as “Rude Boy” and “We Found Love”, on a constantly changing and shifting set of floating platforms, with dancers in comical all-white outfits and sunglasses. It is also noteworthy that during the performance, Rihanna was pregnant with her second child, making the feat all the more impressive.

*A photo of the changing floating platforms utilised in Rihanna’s performance in the Halftime show.*
Photograph: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Another notable happening associated with the super bowl are the movie trailers and advertisements played during the super bowl, with this year featuring trailers for “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantamania”, “The Flash”, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts”, and an especially hilarious ad for Popcorners in which Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, and Raymond Cruz reprise their roles as Jesse Pinkman, Walter White, and Tuco Salamanca, acting out a scene from “Breaking Bad”, (in a parody of the show where all illegal substances, notedly methamphetamine, is replaced with the chips known Popcorners, featuring both iconic and comical scenes from the show), making for a hilarious advertisement which later went viral on Youtube, garnering 5 million views.