With this year’s domestic box office expected to rise to $9 billion, of course the major Hollywood studios are taking Super Bowl LVII ad spots seriously.

The big game, which last year attracted 112 million viewers, remains an enormous bullhorn when it comes to drawing attention to your tentpole movies — and this year, starting with Disney/Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, has a lot of them. So if you’re a studio looking to draw attention and separate your movie from the conveyor belt of events films that are occurring every weekend from late February through September, well then best to pony up a record $7 million for a 30-second spot on the February 12 Fox telecast of the Kansas City Chiefs-Philadelphia Eagles showdown.

In recent years –before and after the pandemic– Super Bowl trailers have become events in of themselves. Studios often debut a portion of them in advance of the game before dropping something longer by Sunday. The spoils occur on social media on the Monday following the game as many catch up with trailers that aired; last year, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was the most watched spot on social in the 24 hours following the L.A. Rams’ victory over the Bengals with 93M views, according to RelishMix — that movie ultimately posted the biggest opening at the box office last year in the U.S. and Canada with $187.4M, and the third highest of the year at $411M behind Top Gun: Maverick ($718.3M) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ($436.4M) in calendar-year grosses.

A big deal this year: Warner Bros, which has typically sat on the sidelines in previous Super Bowls, is expected to have a spot for the June 16 release of DC’s The Flash, which the comic book studio’s co-boss James Gunn has declared “probably one of the greatest superhero movies ever made.” The pic starring Ezra Miller is expected to re-set the DC Universe.

For more on Super Bowl trailers coming, click here.

via Deadline