The Walt Disney Co. on Wednesday announced it has sold its last available commercial unit in ABC/ESPN’s Super Bowl LXI telecast next February.Speaking to investors near the midway point of the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Disney chief financial officer Hugh Johnston broke the news while responding to a query about the 2026-27 upfront bazaar. “Sports volumes were up low teens and we are very, very pleased to announce that we have sold out the Super Bowl inventory,” Johnston said.Johnston’s seemingly off-the-cuff revelation came just moments before Disney’s corporate communications apparatus fired off an email alert confirming the Big Game’s sellout. The team led by Rita Ferro cut deals with 58 brands representing 34 distinct categories, including financial services, candy, personal care and software, which the company characterized as the “broadest advertiser and category mixes in Super Bowl history.”Nine of those brands will be making their first appearance in the Big Game.“Our upfront and a sold-out Super Bowl LXI make it clear: Brands see Disney as a must-have investment—one built on our ability to deliver audiences at scale, across live events and streaming, all year long,” said Ferro, who serves as Disney’s president of global advertising.While Disney did not disclose the cost of securing airtime in the NFL’s Feb. 14 extravaganza, media buyers said the going rate for a 30-second unit was somewhere between $8.5 million and $9 million a pop. Last year at around this time, NBC was dealing in-game spots at $8 million and up, with latecomers ponying up as much as $10 million for each half-minute.Disney’s announcement marks the earliest a network has locked in its Super Bowl inventory. A year ago, NBC wrapped its sales the day before its annual broadcast of the NFL Kickoff Game. Despite the soaring costs associated with getting one’s brand in front of well over 120 million viewers—when the decade began, the average unit price in Super Bowl LIV on Fox was $5.4 million a throw—the demand only seems to grow with each passing year.In the run-up to the aforementioned Fox Super Bowl in 2020, the last in-game unit was locked in three days before Thanksgiving Day 2019. The two previous years saw CBS and NBC shifting their final commercial spots within 24 hours of the opening kickoff.Much has changed since ABC last hosted the Super Bowl in 2006. For one thing, the going rate for an in-game unit in that Steelers-Cardinals nail-biter was $2.5 million, or $4.2 million when adjusted for inflation. Per Nielsen, Pittsburgh’s victory in Detroit averaged “just” 90.7 million viewers, which would be a huge letdown in today’s TV market. Earlier this year, NBC/Peacock’s coverage of Seattle’s 29-13 triumph over New England averaged 124.9 million viewers.Because so much time has elapsed since Disney last covered the Super Bowl, the company wasn’t burdened by the same degree of obligations to incumbent sponsors that CBS, Fox and NBC face. In other words, the Mouse House didn’t necessarily have to make any special accommodations for deep-pocketed perennials such as Anheuser Busch-InBev and PepsiCo, arrangements that usually take the form of favored ad-pod placements. (Budweiser, for example, has long enjoyed first dibs on “A” positions, industry argot for the much-viewed ads that are the first to air in any given commercial break.)While Disney’s announcement is yet another sign that the NFL TV market remains in rude good health—the league’s TV partners last season raked in a record $5.87 billion in sales, up 7% versus the previous campaign—there’s always a little wiggle room around the concept of a sellout when the Super Bowl is in play. Which is to say, the possibility to carve out an additional ad slot or two is never entirely off the table until the football leaves the tee during the opening kickoff.For example, then-CBS Corp. president and CEO Les Moonves in 2015 boasted that his sales team had squirreled away units in Super Bowl 50 as a hedge to sell them off at a premium to a last-minute shopper. “Two weeks before, some movie producer who thinks he has a bad movie will convince the studio to spend more money on it … and they’re going to beg us for two spots,” Moonves said, before going on to intimate that the final spots would sell at a markup of $1 million or more over CBS’ original $4.8 million asking price.However things shake out with Super Bowl LXI, Disney is all but certain to break NBC’s year-ago sales record. NBC generated an estimated $920 million with its in-game selloff, during a blockbuster first quarter that saw Comcast’s media unit report a grand total of $1.92 billion in combined Super Bowl and Olympics revenues.