The Jurassic Park Xfinity Super Bowl Commercial Is A Nostalgia Play Gone Nightmarishly Wrong

If you're a company looking to spend outlandish amounts of money to advertise to the world during the Super Bowl, how do you justify offloading all that cash? You make something that cuts through the noise, stands out, and otherwise gets people's attention. Well, Comcast's Xfinity has accomplished that goal, but not in the way it hoped.

Above, I've embedded a Super Bowl commercial in which Xfinity products save the day in Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park," restoring power to the park's electric fences and preventing any of the dinosaur horrors from taking place. Digitally de-aged versions of Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Ellie Sattler, and Dr. Ian Malcolm subsequently have a grand old time on the grounds, taking selfies with T-rexes and saying cringe-worthy things like, "Wi-fi finds a way." The commercial doesn't even have the decency to let the annoying Xfinity salesperson be attacked by a dinosaur at the end.

We've seen this type of blatant pandering from clueless companies trying to convince viewers to associate their products with the positive feelings people might have toward familiar characters and iconography (Xfinity did this with "E.T." a few years ago), but this particular example marks a new low for the genre.

I cannot adequately express how disappointed I am in Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, and Taika Waititi, who directed this abomination. (Waititi has now made something worse than his 2023 sports film "Next Goal Wins," continuing the downward trajectory of his career.) I suspect they were all paid handsomely for their work, and on one hand, it's hard to fault anyone for taking an easy paycheck from a mega-corporation. But on the other, are these people incapable of feeling any shame? Is it truly worth it to put a dollar amount on your dignity?

And from Comcast's perspective, it's clear the people behind this commercial learned absolutely nothing from "Jurassic Park." The whole point of the film is just because you have the technology to do something, doesn't mean you should actually do that thing! I haven't seen a misread this obvious since Netflix turned "Squid Game" into a reality show. The digital de-aging looks horrifying here, and the writing is atrocious.

"By combining the timeless characters and iconic moments of the original film with modern technology, we're celebrating the legacy of 'Jurassic Park' while introducing it to a new generation," Universal Entertainment's chief brand officer, David O'Connor, told Entertainment Weekly in a statement. I think I can confidently speak for everyone when I say that this is the worst introduction to the "Jurassic Park" franchise anyone could possibly have. 

Anyway, I look forward to an inevitable OpenAI commercial that inserts Sam Altman into the "Terminator" movies and has him tell Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 to use ChatGPT to find Sarah Connor.