The image is pure Kardashian theater. Kendall Jenner gliding through a mansion, a rose wilting on cue, basketball jerseys going up in symbolic flames. Offscreen, her sisters are pulling out their phones and their betting apps, determined to turn a viral in-joke about a “Kardashian curse” into a family power play.
TLDR
Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner are turning the so-called Kardashian curse into a family in joke, publicly backing the Seahawks after Kendall’s viral betting commercial plays her dating reputation for laughs.
Kendall Turns a Meme Into Paycheck
In the glossy new “Fanatics Sportsbook” commercial, Kendall leans straight into the internet narrative that has followed her for years. Dressed in a sleek black swimsuit, she lifts a delicate teacup and opens with a line tailored for meme culture: “Haven’t you heard? The internet says I’m cursed.”
The ad references her string of NBA romances. Onscreen, Kendall explains that “any basketball player who dates me kind of hits a rough patch” as she strikes a match and tosses it into a bin filled with basketball jerseys. The symbolism is not subtle. Jerseys burn, a rose droops, and the camera lingers on portraits of Kendall posed beside faceless ex-boyfriends, their images erased.
According to Page Six, the spot shows her wandering through a sprawling mansion, pausing at each tableau like she is walking through a museum of her own tabloid history. At one point, she emerges from a glittering pool and shrugs, quipping that one particular “basketball boyfriend” missed the playoffs and that “nobody was getting a ring in this house.”
By the time she settles into a private jet, Kendall signals the punch line and the pivot. She announces she is ready to “bet on something new. Football players.” Then she lands the closing line: “The Kardashian curse, it’s not even my last name.”
It is a commercial built on the idea that if the world insists on gossiping about your love life, you might as well get paid for the conversation.
The same meme that once painted the sisters as bad luck for athletes is now a plot device in a big-budget Super Bowl campaign. That is a brand pivot in real time.
Kim and Kylie Turn It Into a Bit
Kim was not about to let her younger sister have the storyline to herself. According to Page Six, the Skims founder took to Instagram Stories to showcase her own “Fanatics Sportsbook” wager on the upcoming matchup between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks.
Instead of some high roller flex, Kim posted a screenshot of a tiny 69-cent bet in favor of the Seahawks, paired with an outsized possible payout graphic and a caption that played directly into the narrative. Across the image, she wrote, “Here me out … I’m proving the curse ISN’T real because one of us will win.”
The grammar may have been casual, but the message was clear. Kim was framing the sisters as the ones in on the joke, not the punch line. If a Kardashian is supposedly bad luck for athletes, then Kim would simply pick a side and dare the myth to hold.
Kylie followed swiftly. On her own Instagram Stories, she reposted Kim’s betting slip and announced that she was also backing the Seahawks. Over the screengrab, Kylie wrote her own line: “Kim traded on the Seahawks,” before needling the family history by joking, “Am I saying I copied her by trading on the Seahawks?”
The wink was hard to miss. Kylie was referencing the long-documented tension between Kim and Kourtney over Kourtney’s wedding to Travis Barker in Italy, several years after Kim married Kanye West in the same country. That conflict helped fuel more recent seasons of “The Kardashians” on Hulu, turning an argument about venues and aesthetics into a storyline that lingered in confessionals and on social media.
Here, Kylie flips that sibling rivalry into a comedic callback. Instead of fighting over a ceremony, the younger sister is faux confessing that she might have copied a bet on a football team. The stakes are fantasy level. The tone stays light. The family dynamic still takes center stage.
The Curse and the Kardashian Brand
The so-called Kardashian curse has hovered around the family since the 2010s. A fan-built theory that men who date Kardashian and Jenner women see their careers stumble. It is a narrative that has never sat well with the sisters, partly because it reduces their relationships to superstition and partly because it implies an almost mystical blame for very human struggles.
Kendall’s dating life has been charted across social media and sports broadcasts alike. According to People, her romantic history has included NBA players such as Devin Booker, Ben Simmons, Blake Griffin, and Jordan Clarkson. Highlights and heartbreaks from those relationships often played out in real time for fans, which made her love life an easy target for armchair pattern seeking.
The curse storyline also ignored the basic math of celebrity dating. High-profile relationships usually occur between two people already under immense scrutiny. Careers rise and fall, injuries happen, trades happen, and personal lives unravel for reasons that have nothing to do with who someone is sitting courtside with.
Still, a meme has its own momentum. For a segment of fans, the phrase “Kardashian curse” became shorthand for a belief that proximity to this family brings more drama than success. By centering an entire Super Bowl ad on that meme and inviting her sisters into the follow-up, Kendall is taking some of that power back.
The ad allows her to acknowledge the chatter without ceding control of the narrative. She is the one staging the visual metaphors and delivering the punch lines. The jerseys do not burn in a paparazzi snapshot. They burn on her set, on her timing, in a spot she is being paid to headline.
Super Bowl Stage, Family Strategy
Super Bowl weekend has become one of the most important branding moments of the year, even for stars who never set foot on the field. For the Kardashian-Jenner family, it is a natural arena. Their relationships and friendships have long overlapped with sports and music, from Kim and Kanye West to Kylie and Travis Scott.
Kendall’s ad arrives in a world where crossovers between reality television, sports, and pop music are now routine. According to Billboard, Bad Bunny joined Shakira and Jennifer Lopez on the Super Bowl halftime stage in 2020, underscoring how Latin pop and hip hop have become central to the NFL’s biggest broadcast. That same Bad Bunny also dated Kendall, which only further entwines her personal life with the league’s showcase event.
Kim and Kylie’s Seahawks wagers are not just about a football result. They are a reminder that the sisters understand how to extend a storyline across platforms. The ad airs for millions, the Instagram jokes travel to millions more, and suddenly, a concept that once felt like an internet dig has been rebranded as a family bit.
There is also a quieter reputational play. By treating the curse as a joke, they can defuse with humor and a few small bets, the women position themselves as savvy, self-aware, and unbothered. They are no longer trying to deny the meme exists. They are treating it as raw material.
For longtime viewers who remember them as twentysomethings on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” there is a note of nostalgia in how this unfolds. The sisters are still arguing, still teasing, still turning private friction into public storylines. The settings and stakes, however, have scaled up from Calabasas living rooms to global Super Bowl ad buys.
Whether the Seahawks deliver the outcome Kim and Kylie are hoping for is almost beside the point. The real win is that the family has, once again, managed to turn a narrative that could have wounded their image into one more chapter in the Kardashian-Jenner saga, written on their terms.
Join the Discussion
Do you see Kendall, Kim, and Kylie’s moves as a smart way to reclaim the Kardashian curse narrative, or does leaning into the joke keep the myth alive?
