Paramount+ and Droga5 turned Super Bowl LVIII into a star-studded climb, casting Patrick Stewart, Drew Barrymore and Tua Tagovailoa in a 2024 streaming brand
ARCHIVEParamount+ Bets on Patrick Stewart to Conquer the Mountain
Paramount+ aired "A Mountain of Entertainment — Hail Patrick" during Super Bowl LVIII on February 11, 2024, a film spot created by Droga5 that continues the platform's signature Paramount Mountain climbing metaphor, starring Patrick Stewart, Drew Barrymore, and Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa to dramatise the breadth of the streamer's content library for audiences across the United States.
The spot occupies a specific and well-worn creative territory for Paramount+. According to Clapboard's editorial observation, "Hail Patrick" represents the fourth consecutive year the brand has deployed its mountain-climbing device at scale, making it the 15th expedition in the "A Mountain of Entertainment" series since its United States launch in 2021. The central comic premise pivots on Patrick Stewart — Sir Patrick, as the ad pointedly reminds viewers — proposing that the group use Arnold, the "Football Head" character from the animated series Hey Arnold!, as improvised climbing equipment, a gag that fuses the platform's sports rights, its classic Nickelodeon animation library, and its prestige-drama credibility into a single absurdist image. Drew Barrymore's presence simultaneously cues her eponymous daytime talk show, which streams on Paramount+, while Tua Tagovailoa anchors the NFL on CBS rights that sit at the commercial heart of the platform's value proposition in the United States. The campaign was published in February 2024 in the United States and is classified within the TV and Streaming Promos industry category. It contains three media assets and was directed by David Shane through production company O Positive, as reported by Ad Age. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 78 out of 100, reflecting strong creative coherence and cultural timing offset by the inherent constraints of a format that has now run for four consecutive years.
ARCHIVEParamount+ occupies a distinctive competitive position in the United States streaming landscape. The platform held approximately 72 million subscribers at year-end 2024, up from roughly 63 million by September 2023, according to MIDiA Research and reporting corroborated by Media Play News. That trajectory places Paramount+ in direct competition with Netflix, which commands the largest subscriber base in the United States, and with Disney+, which bundles aggressively to defend its domestic footprint. In this environment, Super Bowl LVIII — broadcast on CBS, which is itself distributed through Paramount+ — provided a uniquely efficient media moment: the platform could advertise its streaming service inside the very broadcast it was simultaneously streaming, collapsing the distance between awareness and conversion.
The strategic logic of the Paramount Mountain campaign, now in its fourth year, is grounded in a consumer insight that the platform's content library is genuinely wide but risks feeling unfocused. By literalising the metaphor of a climb — with each celebrity representing a content vertical — Droga5 gives viewers a spatial and narrative framework for understanding a catalogue that spans NFL football, Nickelodeon animation, prestige drama, and daytime television. According to Growth Market Reports, the global streaming-media market was valued at a substantial and growing figure in 2024, with premium SVOD subscriptions in the United States exceeding 260 million that year, up roughly ten percent year over year per Streaming Media, indicating that the acquisition battle in the US market remains fierce even as growth normalises. The choice to place Patrick Stewart at the creative centre of the 2024 execution reflects a calculated bet: Stewart carries simultaneous associations with Paramount's Star Trek franchise, with theatrical prestige, and — crucially — with a droll, self-aware comic register that allows the ad to be, as Ad Age described it, "amusingly dark" without alienating a mass Super Bowl audience.
Director David Shane of production company O Positive helmed "Hail Patrick," as reported by Ad Age. Shane brings a long record in high-profile comedy commercials, and his casting instinct here is precise: Patrick Stewart's delivery of the Hail Arnold proposition works because it is played entirely straight, the character's theatrical gravity applied without adjustment to a premise that is openly ridiculous. The comedic architecture of the spot depends on that tonal contrast — Drew Barrymore and Tua Tagovailoa react with calibrated disbelief while Stewart remains serenely committed to the plan, a dynamic that mirrors the broader campaign strategy of anchoring absurdity in recognisable star personas.
The production deploys the Paramount Mountain set as a recurring physical world that now carries four years of brand memory for returning viewers in the United States. The mountain environment functions as a contained stage, allowing the creative team to introduce new characters and content references each year without rebuilding the conceptual scaffolding. In 2021, as noted by the Shorty Awards and corroborated by Marketing Brew, the inaugural "Journey to the Peak" campaign by Droga5 introduced roughly 30 stars from film, television, sports, and news in six films, establishing the formula that "Hail Patrick" inherits and refines. By 2024, the mountain set reads less as a production choice and more as a brand asset — a proprietary creative world that competitors including Netflix and Disney+ do not possess. The Hey Arnold! animation cameo required coordination across Paramount's animation library and represents a moment of genuine creative integration: the character is not a licensed insert but an internal IP asset, deployed to demonstrate catalogue depth rather than simply assert it. Ad Age selected the work as an Editor's Pick, recognising the execution's efficiency in carrying multiple content messages within a single comic beat. Production credits beyond David Shane and O Positive are not fully detailed in publicly available documentation.
No independently verified subscriber-conversion figures directly attributable to "Hail Patrick" are publicly available in a form that isolates the spot's impact from Paramount+'s broader Super Bowl LVIII marketing activity. What the public record does confirm is substantial organic reach. According to data surfaced by Ad Age and corroborated through YouTube analytics cited in the campaign record, the two-minute YouTube version of the spot received approximately 10.7 million views, while the full campaign YouTube presence reached approximately 14.5 million views with over 36,000 likes and more than 3,200 comments. Those figures reflect genuine audience engagement rather than paid impressions, a meaningful distinction in an environment where streaming platforms routinely purchase view counts through pre-roll inventory.
The Clio Music 2025 Gold Award, identified in the Clapboard campaign archive, recognises the campaign's use of music and sound within the broader creative execution. Ad Age's Editor's Pick designation adds a second layer of industry recognition from a named trade publication. Structurally, the campaign demonstrates the compound value of recurring creative platforms: each new Paramount Mountain execution benefits from the brand memory deposited by previous years, reducing the cognitive load required to orient a new viewer while rewarding returning audiences with continuity. In the United States streaming market, where Paramount+ competes against well-resourced rivals for the same household spending, that recognition efficiency — the ability to re-establish brand context in the first two seconds of a Super Bowl spot — is a measurable strategic asset, even when its precise commercial contribution resists clean attribution.
"Hail Patrick" is a Paramount+ Super Bowl LVIII commercial created by Droga5 and directed by David Shane, aired February 11, 2024. The spot stars Patrick Stewart, Drew Barrymore, and Tua Tagovailoa climbing Paramount Mountain, with Stewart proposing the Hey Arnold! character as climbing equipment to represent the platform's content breadth.
David Shane of production company O Positive directed the Paramount+ Super Bowl 2024 commercial, as reported by Ad Age. Shane's direction keeps Stewart's delivery deliberately deadpan against Drew Barrymore's and Tua Tagovailoa's reactions, generating the spot's central comedic tension within the recurring Paramount Mountain creative world.
"Hail Patrick" received a Clio Music 2025 Gold Award, as identified in the Clapboard campaign archive. The recognition acknowledges the campaign's integration of music and sound within its broader creative execution. Ad Age also named the work an Editor's Pick, marking it among the most discussed Super Bowl commercials of 2024.
The Paramount+ "Hail Patrick" Super Bowl spot accumulated approximately 14.5 million total YouTube views, with the two-minute extended version alone reaching approximately 10.7 million views, per figures reported by Ad Age and reflected in the campaign's YouTube record. The video also received over 36,000 likes and more than 3,200 comments.
Droga5 launched the Paramount Mountain campaign with the "Journey to the Peak" films at Paramount+'s United States debut in March 2021, according to the Shorty Awards and Marketing Brew. "Hail Patrick" in 2024 marks the fourth consecutive year and the 15th expedition in the series, making the mountain one of US streaming advertising's most sustained creative platforms.
Paramount+ held approximately 72 million subscribers at year-end 2024, up from roughly 63 million by September 2023, according to MIDiA Research and Media Play News. The Super Bowl LVIII broadcast on CBS — simultaneously streamed on Paramount+ — gave the platform a rare opportunity to advertise directly to its own potential subscriber base in the United States.
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