Panda Express Aunties Assemble Sends an Everyday Hero to the Rescue
Panda Express launched Aunties Assemble in the United States in September 2025, a narrative-driven film campaign created by independent agency Opinionated that positions a caring aunt as an everyday action hero who springs into motion the moment her niece goes hungry, with Panda Express framed as the reliable solution she delivers.
The campaign carries a direct, disarming premise: not all heroes wear capes. Where conventional food advertising leads with product, Aunties Assemble leads with character, following an aunt named Cici through a sequence of physical feats — sliding across a car hood, hurdling a fence, kicking down a door — each act of mild derring-do driven entirely by the imperative to feed a hungry family member. Panda Express is not incidental to the story; it is the object of the mission, the thing Cici is racing to deliver. The brand becomes synonymous with the act of caring, and the auntie becomes its avatar. Distributed across television, social media, and online video in the United States, the campaign reaches a broad mainstream American audience through channels that reward both short-form shareability and longer narrative engagement. Opinionated, a Tombras company appointed as Panda Express creative agency of record in 2024 according to Mediapost, built the Aunties Assemble film as a sequel to an earlier wave of Panda Express auntie-themed advertising, deepening a character-led brand world rather than starting from scratch. That continuity gives the 2025 campaign accumulated emotional equity, letting audiences recognise and root for a familiar archetype from the first frame. Clapboard scores the campaign 63 out of 100, reflecting competent emotional storytelling and a clearly differentiated brand role, tempered by the inherent constraints of a single-asset film execution.
Panda Express operates in a fast-casual dining segment that has become one of the most contested arenas in American food service. The brand reported approximately $6.7 billion in United States systemwide sales in 2025, up around nine percent year-over-year, according to Dataintelo, and it does so in a market where competitors including Chipotle and Raising Cane's have each built formidable brand identities rooted in either ingredient transparency or cult-like loyalty. Panda Express occupies a distinct lane — Asian-American fast-casual — within a category that, according to Straits Research, is growing at a compound annual rate of roughly six to eight percent depending on methodology, with the Asian fast-casual segment specifically expanding at approximately seven point three percent annually, faster than the broader category average, per 6W Research.
The strategic logic behind Aunties Assemble is grounded in consumer behaviour rather than category convention. Food decisions inside family units are rarely transactional; they are relational. The campaign targets the emotional circuitry that connects hunger, care, and belonging, positioning Panda Express not as a commodity but as a medium through which family members express love. Opinionated, working from an insight that caregiving roles drive significant food purchase behaviour across American households, chose to dramatise that role rather than describe it. The auntie figure carries particular resonance in multicultural American households, where aunts occupy an authoritative and affectionate position that sits somewhere between parent and peer. By centering Cici, the campaign speaks to audiences who already carry lived associations with that archetype, giving the brand a cultural foothold that a product-first execution could not achieve. The ANA has documented the growing importance of multicultural targeting in mainstream US food advertising, and Aunties Assemble reflects that industry-wide reckoning without reducing itself to a narrow identity play — the auntie is coded as universal even as she carries specific cultural warmth.
Aunties Assemble is a production that wears its physical ambition openly. The film deploys practical stunt work — a car-hood slide, a fence hurdle, a door kicked down at the end of a long night on set — to give the auntie-as-hero concept genuine kinetic credibility rather than relying on comedic understatement alone. The decision to shoot these sequences practically, with a stunt double and a stunt driver on location, grounds the campaign's heightened premise in something tangible and earns its action-movie register without tipping into parody.
Chris Le, Senior Copywriter at Opinionated, described the production experience to Muse by Clios in September 2025 with evident enthusiasm. Le noted that the team had a stunt double and stunt driver on set for several scenes and said the crew found it exciting to watch moments come to life — specifically calling out the car-hood slide and the fence hurdle as highlights. Le also told Muse by Clios that the final shot of the film, the moment when Cici kicks down the door, was captured late at night, a detail that speaks to the deliberate pacing of a production willing to hold out for the right take on its climactic beat. Director Kate Hollowell, working through production company Epoch Films, has described aunties as people who live to keep family members fed, per reporting by clapboard.com, a framing that provided the creative with its emotional north star. Hollowell's April 2025 work on the earlier Panda Express auntie campaign — characterised by Shots journalist Carol Cooper as a heartwarming musical celebration of family love — established the tonal ground on which Aunties Assemble then builds its action-comedy superstructure. The continuity of director, agency, and character across both executions gives the 2025 film a coherence of craft and intention that single-campaign thinking rarely achieves. Production credits for the broader campaign team beyond those named above are not fully and publicly documented.
Aunties Assemble accumulates a documented public view count. According to clapboard.com, the campaign film registered approximately 3.68 million views alongside 158 likes and 22 comments across tracked platforms at the time of submission. Those engagement ratios are modest relative to the view count, which suggests the film circulated broadly — likely via paid distribution across television and online video placements in the United States — rather than generating outsized organic sharing. The like-to-view ratio reflects a common pattern for food campaigns distributed at scale: reach is engineered, but earned enthusiasm is harder to manufacture.
No independent third-party verified performance data — including sales lift, brand recall scores, or media efficiency metrics — for Aunties Assemble is publicly available at time of publication. What the structural evidence does indicate is that Opinionated built the campaign with continuity in mind. Aunties Assemble is the second iteration of a character-led auntie platform, and sustained character investment tends to compound brand recognition across successive executions. Panda Express has demonstrated this logic before: a 2022 AAPI Heritage Month campaign in partnership with designer 3.1 Phillip Lim generated more than 1.2 billion earned impressions and reached 7.6 million followers, according to Mediapost, demonstrating that the brand can mobilise substantial earned amplification when creative and cultural timing align. Aunties Assemble operates in a different register — action-comedy rather than cultural celebration — but the underlying mechanic of emotionally resonant character storytelling is consistent. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its emotional brief with competence and visual energy, while leaving room for deeper structural impact had the creative extended across more assets or formats.
Aunties Assemble is a 2025 film campaign for Panda Express created by agency Opinionated, published in the United States in September 2025. It frames a caring aunt named Cici as an everyday action hero who performs physical stunts to deliver Panda Express to her hungry niece, positioning the brand as a dependable act of family love.
Aunties Assemble was created by Opinionated, a Tombras company serving as Panda Express creative agency of record since 2024. The film was produced by Epoch Films and directed by Kate Hollowell. Senior Copywriter Chris Le at Opinionated has spoken publicly about the production, including the stunt work and late-night final shoot.
Aunties Assemble is a sequel within Panda Express's ongoing auntie character platform. An earlier campaign featuring singing aunties and the tagline Have You Eaten Yet launched in April 2025 and was described by Shots as Panda Express's first major national brand campaign, also directed by Kate Hollowell through Epoch Films.
The Aunties Assemble film recorded approximately 3.68 million views, according to clapboard.com, alongside 158 likes and 22 comments on tracked platforms. The view count reflects broad paid distribution across television, social media, and online video channels in the United States, though organic engagement ratios remained modest relative to total reach.
Aunties Assemble receives a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score recognises the campaign's emotionally grounded character storytelling, practical stunt production, and clear brand role, while noting that the single-asset film format and modest organic engagement ratios limit the campaign's overall structural impact and measurable audience conversion.
Panda Express uses the auntie archetype because it carries immediate emotional resonance across multicultural American households, where aunts occupy a recognised caregiving role between parent and peer. Opinionated built the campaign on the insight that food decisions within families are relational rather than transactional, positioning Panda Express as an expression of care rather than mere convenience.
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