Super Bowl XLVI is in the books, ladies and gentlemen.  The Vince Lombardi Trophy will spend the next year hanging out with the New York Giants, while Bill Belichick is currently taking an Imperial Shuttle back to the second Death Star so he can brood over the loss in his throne room.  Over the course of the game, though, there were plenty of high-profile TV spots for some of this year's biggest movies.  We've collected them here so that you can view said TV spots without all that, you know, football.

If you're watching the Super Bowl – the most popular televised event in America – right now, then you no doubt saw that thirty-second TV spot for The Avengers, with its superheroes uniting and Samuel L. Jackson giving some good gravitas.  That spot will be included in our inevitable Super Bowl Spot Roundup, but guess what, Marvel Studios and Disney also just premiered an extended version of the commercial online, and it's way better than the one that was actually on TV.

The weekend of the Super Bowl is generally a pretty quiet one at multiplexes across this great and strange nation of ours, as the annual NFL championship game completely hijacks national attention.  Nobody's really thinking about movies, since there's too much anticipation for commercials interrupted by spurts of football.  Accordingly, with the New England Patriots and the New York Giants squaring off in Indianapolis, nobody expected much from this weekend's new releases, but lo and behold, two of the three newbies surprised.  Both Chronicle and The Woman in Black debuted to over $20 million, with the former edging out the latter for first place.

If yesterday was the day of the commercials for commercials – with both John Carter and The Avengers dropping tiny ten-second teases of their respective Super Bowl commercials – then today is the day of straight-up Super Bowl commercials.  Earlier, The Dictator debuted its full Super Bowl spot, and now Paramount has taken the liberty of unveiling its thirty-second commercial for G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the sequel to 2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra that will attempt to cleanse the taste of that movie from the audience's collective palette.

Did it strike anyone as slightly ridiculous that yesterday we saw two ten-second previews of the John Carter and The Avengers Super Bowl spots?  Commercials are one thing, but commercials for commercials is a whole different level.  Another movie that will be showing up during the copious commercial breaks of America's favorite sporting event is The Dictator, the new comedy starring Sacha Baron Cohen and directed by Larry Charles, the guy behind Borat and Bruno.  The comedy has sidestepped showing a ten-second peek and instead just released its first TV spot wholesale online for your viewing pleasure several days before the big game.

We live in a strange modern age, one in which an event can be made out of a thirty-second commercial and that commercial can be teased by its own ten-second preview.  Strange days.  This morning we shared a crazy-brief tease for the John Carter Super Bowl commercial, and now, there's a superquick glimpse at The Avengers Super Bowl spot. 

With just under a month and a half until the movie actually opens domestically, Disney still has a lot of work to do selling John Carter to a mainstream audience.  Most people don't know Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars from Adam, given that it's a nearly one-hundred year old science fiction adventure tale, so the studio can't exactly sell John Carter as a much-loved, seminal story finally making it to the screen after so many fruitless attempts, nor can they hang it all on a filmmaker audiences recognize, like James Cameron's Avatar. 

A big spot during this Sunday's Super Bowl festivities is no doubt a crucial part of Disney's plan to bombard the world with John Carter in the weeks leading up to its actual release.  In order to build awareness of a promotional tool designed to build awareness, the studio has released a tease of the Super Bowl TV spot into the online wilds.

This Sunday, we’ll get our first look at actual footage for Marvel’s Captain America: The First Avenger in the form of a Super Bowl commercial. To hold you over until then, though, there’s the official teaser poster for the film, featuring Chris Evans as Cap, looking solemn while a bunch of dirt flies around him. Unsurprisingly, Marvel is marketing this as the final film before next summer’s superhero team-up The Avengers by adding the title, “Avenge” to the poster.

There are a whole lot of people who watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials, and there are some of those who watch just for the commercials hyping big, upcoming movies. Well, if you’re one of those people, think of this as a support group. We’ve got a thirty-second ad for Rango, the first animated feature from Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski. The Western-flavored film features the voices of Johnny Depp, Timothy Olyphant, and Isla Fisher.