Grading Bad Bunny’s 2026 Super Bowl Halftime Show

Santa Clara, Calif.—Inside a packed Levi’s Stadium, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—Bad Bunny to the planet’s 19.8-billion-stream fan base—turned the NFL’s most-watched concert into a 13-minute referendum on identity, language and joy. Three months after becoming the first Latino artist ever to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, the Puerto Rican superstar faced a different scoreboard: 12 songs, zero halftime paycheck, and the eyes of an English-dominant audience. By the time a final billboard flashed “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” the only lingering question was how quickly the league could re-book him.

Music: B+ The set list sprinted from 2022’s global smash Tití Me Preguntó to the brand-new Grammy-certified DtMF, folding in merengue, reggaeton and Caribbean swing without pausing for breath. Vocal delivery was crisp even at break-neck speed, but the clock chopped fan favorites La Canción and La noche de anoche, and the absence of expected guests J Balvin or Rosalía left a conspicuous hole. Still, 12 tracks in 12½ minutes is a pacing marvel, and the bilingual Die With a Smile duet with Lady Gaga—reimagined as a horn-driven salsa—provided the harmonic high-point.

Production & Choreography: A- A sugar-cane maze sprouted at midfield, stalks played by 100 dancers parting like the Red Sea as Bad Bunny threaded vignettes of island life. Cameras swooped through a pink casita, tracked the star crowd-surfing horizontally, and captured aerial tableaux usually reserved for Olympic ceremonies. Gaga’s surprise entrance in a traditional Puerto Rican bomba dress and Ricky Martin’s velvet croon on Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii book-ended a production that felt simultaneously intimate and stadium-sized. The only nitpick: a mid-field wedding scene, while charming, briefly muddled sight-lines for the live crowd.

Vibes: A Call it the highest-charted Spanish-language lesson in U.S. history. Fans who spoke zero Spanish danced through every chorus; dancers twirled around telephone poles as a wink to the island’s struggles with power outages. In the night’s most indelible moment, Bad Bunny handed his freshly-minted Grammy to a young boy in the front row, then exited under a canopy of national flags, a wordless ode to immigrants. The gesture landed harder than any political slogan, especially after his recent “ICE out” Grammys quip. Kendrick Lamar gave Super Bowl LIX cultural gravity; Bad Bunny answered with cathartic celebration.

Bottom Line A bilingual, cross-generational party that never felt like homework, the show cemented Bad Bunny’s leap from streaming king to pop-culture statesman. If the NFL’s goal was to speak to a broader, browner, more global audience, the league just earned an A-plus in demographics—and the halftime committee a new gold standard to chase.