Watch The Super Bowl Halftime Trailer Starring Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, & Mary J. Blige
The Super Bowl Halftime Show is always a big deal, but this year, it’s going to be an especially big deal. Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation has been responsible for booking the show for the past three years, and for this year’s display, they’ll follow last year’s freaky Weeknd set with an interconnected web of the biggest stars in rap history. It’ll be Dr. Dre and his collaborators Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, and Mary J. Blige. (The fact that 50 Cent isn’t part of this group might be the coldest evidence of his general fall-off since he lost that opening-week record-sales battle to Kanye West.) Today, all of those stars make appearances in the extremely fancy trailer for the Halftime Show.
The Halftime Show trailer comes from Straight Outta Compton auteur F. Gary Gray, who does everything in his power to make all these people look like towering figures. The conceit of the ad is that all of these stars are doing what they do everyday — writing raps, driving around in lowriders — when they get word from Dre that their presence has been requested. You wouldn’t think that this would require as much CGI as any random four-minute stretch of any Marvel movie, but that’s how Gray has decided to do things.
In the preview, we see a digitally de-aged circa-1999 version of Eminem, a beach where giant piano keys emerge from the water, and a cityscape that’s been transformed into a chessboard. All the stars look like uncanny special-effects versions of themselves. This whole thing feels like evidence that the Tupac hologram will make its grand return at the Halftime Show. Check it out below.
This whole spectacle goes down 2/13 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.