Mountain Dew Remakes The Shining With Bryan Cranston for New Super Bowl Commercial

Big stars and totally insane ideas are marks of most memorable Super Bowl commercials. Each and every year, brands try to get the biggest names they can to appear in a zany super bowl commercial, a trend that’s being continued in 2020 by the likes of Hyundai, Planters, and Mountain Dew. In order to build buzz for the new Mountain Dew Zero Sugar, and tell consumers that it’s “as good as the original,” the company has decided to remake Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining with Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston playing the role of Jack Torrance.

The new commercial was released online on Tuesday morning, and recreates a couple of the most iconic sequences from The Shining. However, instead of Jack Nicholson trying to murder his entire family while cooped up in an enormous hotel, Cranston carries around an ax in order to get Tracee Ellis Ross to try the new Dew. It’s bizarre, but it’s certain to accomplish its goal of getting people talking. You can take a look at the full commercial below.

Of course, the biggest moment of the ad centers around the most memorable scene in all of The Shining, in which Jack sticks his face through a freshly-chopped hole in the door and yells “Here’s Johnny!” In this commercial, however, Cranston breaks through the door only to yell “Here’s Mountain Dew Zero!” Ross, playing the role of Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrance, starts to scream but ultimately accepts the beverage because she’s thirsty.

And let’s not forget about the final shot of the commercial in which Cranston dresses as the creepy twin girls in the hallway. It’s as crazy as it sounds.

“DEW launched a Zero Sugar product for the first time ever this January and we’re using our Super Bowl spot to tell fans it’s ‘As Good As the Original, Maybe Even Better.’ We partnered with two major Hollywood actors to help us tell that story on one of the world’s biggest stages,” said Erin Chin, Senior Director, Marketing, MTN DEW. “We hope fans will enjoy the unexpected humor and fantastic casting. Tracee and Bryan had incredible chemistry and the energy on set was dynamic.”

The new Mountain Dew Zero commercial is set to play during the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 2nd.