Bryan Cranston Recreates ‘The Shining’ In Bizarre Super Bowl Ad
Stanley Kubrick was a noted perfectionist. No detail was left to chance or accident. He spent years honing each project. He would shoot hundreds of takes of seemingly simple shots. His fans scrutinize his films like they are religious texts.
But do you think he liked Mountain Dew?
That is what I am left wondering after this very strange and frankly quite troubling new commercial for the Dew, which is set to air during this year’s Super Bowl. It stars Bryan Cranston and Tracee Ellis Ross in an impressively accurate recreation of Kubrick’s The Shining. There was Mountain Dew Zero all over the place in the original film too, right?
Cranston plays the Jack Nicholson role; Ross is Shelley Duvall. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but it’s maybe the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen.
And you thought the actual Shining was scary.
This ad is part of an entire trend toward weirdly accurate recreations of The Shining in recent years. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One featured an entire sequence set in the Overlook Hotel from the film, and last fall, Stephen King’s own adaptation of The Shining, was adapted into its own movie, Doctor Sleep, which culminated in Ewan McGregor’s grown-up Danny Torrance returning to the Overlook to confront his literal demons while helping a young woman with psychic powers of her own. (He doesn’t find any Mountain Dew there, sadly.)
The concept here is this new Mountain Dew Zero beverage is “as good as the original, maybe even better” — so you take an original film like The Shining and cheekily remake it. To their credit, I will not be able to get the image of that giant wave of Mountain Dew pouring out of the Overlook elevator for a long time. You can watch the Super Bowl on February 2, 2020.
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