No Super Bowl 50 Highlight Film?
Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2026 6:47 am
This is starting to drive me crazier the more time goes by. Surely we all are familiar with the 22 minute NFL Films Super Bowl highlight movies. Always has been a tradition to watch all of them before the current Super Bowl. They used to marathon them on ESPN and later NFL Network the weekend of the game.
I bought the 1-40 set DVD box set years ago and have a VHS tape that I recorded 41 to 50-something from an HDMI converter connecting a Roku to a VCR(yeah I'm hardcore). This year since it's Super Bowl 60 I have been watching 1 highlight film every day since December 11th, like a 60 for XL project if you will.
I made it to Super Bowl 50 this morning and it drives me nuts that there was never an official highlight film made for this game. Why would the NFL allow that tradition to lapse on the 50th anniversary of the game? Did NFL Films go through some transition around that time? I noticed the film for 49 was really generic, no narration(just pop up text factoids) and sounds like public domain music, completely bucking the format for the 48 films that came before it. Then they just skipped 50 altogether. Starting with 51 they went back to the old 22 minute highlight film format but as part of some other series I forget the name of.
Was 2015-2016 the point where NFL Films as we knew it died? No longer a film company making movies but just a digital media branch of the NFL that produces social media content?
I bought the 1-40 set DVD box set years ago and have a VHS tape that I recorded 41 to 50-something from an HDMI converter connecting a Roku to a VCR(yeah I'm hardcore). This year since it's Super Bowl 60 I have been watching 1 highlight film every day since December 11th, like a 60 for XL project if you will.
I made it to Super Bowl 50 this morning and it drives me nuts that there was never an official highlight film made for this game. Why would the NFL allow that tradition to lapse on the 50th anniversary of the game? Did NFL Films go through some transition around that time? I noticed the film for 49 was really generic, no narration(just pop up text factoids) and sounds like public domain music, completely bucking the format for the 48 films that came before it. Then they just skipped 50 altogether. Starting with 51 they went back to the old 22 minute highlight film format but as part of some other series I forget the name of.
Was 2015-2016 the point where NFL Films as we knew it died? No longer a film company making movies but just a digital media branch of the NFL that produces social media content?