On February 11, 2024, over 123 million viewers tuned in to Super Bowl LVIII . The team at New Rockstars , a YouTube channel that analyzes and dissects geek culture, were among those glued to their TVs. Their attention was not on the football game, or even on Taylor Swift’s highly publicized reactions to it, but on one specific commercial that they suspected would air that night: the teaser trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine .
“We know, based on a movie's release date, when the marketing cycle will typically begin,” says Erik Voss, New Rockstars’ head of content and one of their onscreen personas. “We actually made a decision that Super Bowl Sunday would be a work day for all of us, because we knew how important this trailer would be.” Deadpool & Wolverine , out this week, was the lynchpin of New Rockstars’ 2024 content programming strategy, and the channel’s creators had been laying the groundwork for the trailer release since the beginning of the year.
Before Super Bowl kickoff, they had already produced rewatch videos of the two previous Deadpool movies and all 13 of the previous X-Men films, including the 2009 one in which the Deadpool character was inauspiciously introduced. The New Rockstars team had also been intensively studying every aspect of the life of Ryan Reynolds, the new film’s star, cowriter, and animating force, as if they were special agents working up a criminal profile. Sure enough, the initial teaser trailer dropped during the game, and Ne.