February 11, 2026

UNEXPECTEDLY: Bad Bunny Reportedly Lost Record Slice of Super Bowl Viewers Heading Into Halftime Show.

It looks like a record number of Super Bowl viewers stopped watching once Bad Bunny started his halftime performance on Sunday.

That’s according to a new report from Front Office Sports on Wednesday, with reporter Ryan Glasspiegel explaining on X:

Based on my understanding of the data, Bad Bunny lost more [percentage] of the Super Bowl viewership from the end of the second quarter than has ever happened before.

His conclusion is based on quarter-hour ratings data from Nielsen.

Glasspiegel reported 135.9 million people were watching the NBC and Telemundo broadcasts between 8:00-8:14 p.m. ET on Sunday; that dropped to 128.2 million combined viewers between 8:15-8:29 p.m. That exodus of 7.7 million viewers lined up with the halftime show.

“Bad Bunny’s performance occurred during the latter window,” he explained. “This was a decline of 7% from the game’s peak viewership of 137.9 million in the second quarter, and 5.7% from the immediately preceding quarter-hour.”

The article noted that the audience typically increases for the halftime show during most Super Bowls, but last year’s performance from Kendrick Lamar also took a dip when it shed 4% of viewers who were watching towards the end of the first half.

I clicked over to watch the game recap on the NFL Channel, then clicked back to see what the fuss was about, only to see Mr. Bunny was imitating the Weeknd’s 2021 Super Bowl halftime show, with the Weekend’s maze of lights being replaced by a field of polypropylene sugarcane. I quickly clicked back to the NFL Channel.

 

 

Posted at 4:49 pm by Ed Driscoll