Stallone vs. Stewart: How Paramount+ Turned It Around

Image credit: BoliviaInteligente via Unsplash

The Super Bowl. 

Every year we crown a winner of this hard-fought battle of giants. A team of people, working together until they have nothing else to give so that they can come home with the grandest accolade of all…best ad.

This year a contender, if not my favourite, was Paramount’s entry, which I will call ‘Throw The Child’. Full disclosure, when someone told me to watch this, I steadied myself for two minutes of my life I will never get back.

This is because last year, Paramount’s entry had exactly the same set-up. A bunch of famous (and expensive) characters/actors on a mountain doing stuff. It was led by Sylvester Stallone climbing a giant literal cliff face of his own face and was so crushingly unfunny, that I had to take a moment after to compose myself.

So how does exactly the same premise, agency and director go from arguably the worst ad of last year, to the best in 2024?

Simple. Quality writing.

Too many Super Bowl ads rely on star power and forego the essential ingredient that is craft. It has to actually be funny, or it’s not a comedy ad. It’s a bunch of celebs saying things that people deemed funny enough.

Paramount’s set-up is at its core sketch-based comedy. They aren’t hard selling anything except content everybody loves already. There’s no lateral take here about why you should buy it, so the whole thing lives or dies on what the joke they’re actually trying to tell is.

Last year was a stretch. Stallone climbing his own granite face felt like the 17th script presented to the client after they wouldn’t buy anything else. It was safe, relying on weird instead of clever and lacking in any real kind of observational truth that makes the best comedy. Even the bit around Stallone stealing the attention felt forced and cliched, rather than something that genuinely reflected an action star of yesteryear. As a result it fell flatter than Stallone’s…well fall off a mountain.

This year, taking the often memed football shape of Hey Arnold’s head and turning that into a joke about boomers' lack of child safety standards, is a gloriously wild departure in tone and a vastly superior starting point for a setup. 

Patrick Stewart being in on the self-deprecating joke about his own age is just the cherry on the sundae. The stand-out part of course being the aforementioned ‘we throw the child’ line, said gleefully by the octogenarian British treasure when asked about how they reach the summit of the mountain. 

I can only imagine the debate around keeping this in. Kudos to the team and client for not only doing so but actually doubling down on it being a chant and written on Sir Patick’s sleeve. It’s important because this is the kind of thing that makes or breaks comedy writing. If the edges of the square are removed, we no longer have a square. Just a nondescript object that once at some point possibly resembled a square.

Director David Shane again proving here, why he is the king of performance comedy in advertising right now. The timing of it felt tight and the little touches like Patrick Stewart singing a slightly untuneful version of the Creed song chorus cross faded against the cartoon child he just threw at a wall of solid rock, elevate it in all the right ways.

The end result was more like a (good) Saturday Night Live sketch than an ad. Which is what you are aiming for when the only thing you are trying to do is be funny.

It’s often hard to do proper comedy in advertising, especially on the biggest stage of them all with the highest budgets and stakes. That’s why I don't blame anyone for fumbling the head-shaped ball because there are just too many factors at play. We are by nature a sanitised industry and the risk-to-reward ratio is too often focussed on the risk side. But this is a great example of embracing things that not ‘everyone’ will necessarily find funny and as a result, discovering that this is the key to actually making people laugh.

I leave you with this quote from cartoon duck Eric Tiberius Duckman:

“Comedy should provoke. It should blast through prejudices, and challenge preconceptions. Comedy should always leave you different than when it found you. Sure humour can hurt - even alienate - but the risk is better than the alternative; a steady diet of innocuous, childproof, flavourless mush.”