The NFL has not officially replaced Bad Bunny with Eminem for the Super Bowl LX halftime show in New Orleans, despite what dozens of viral headlines and “breaking news” posts claimed over the past 72 hours.
As of December 1, 2025, the league continues to list Bad Bunny as the headliner for February 8, 2026, exactly as announced in September.
Yet the internet storm that followed Eminem’s surprise appearance during the Thanksgiving halftime show in Detroit has been so intense that many fans genuinely believe the switch has already happened.
It all started on November 27, when the Detroit Lions hosted Green Bay in the traditional Thanksgiving afternoon game at Ford Field. The scheduled halftime performer was supposed to be country singer Bailey Zimmerman, a relatively safe and low-key choice. Few expected what came next.
As Zimmerman finished his set, the lights dropped, the opening guitar riff of “Lose Yourself” blasted through the stadium, and Eminem emerged from beneath the stage in a black hoodie, and the crowd of 65,000 lost their collective minds.
For the next eight minutes, Eminem, joined by Jack White and a surprise cameo from Big Sean, delivered what many are already calling the most electric unscheduled halftime performance in recent NFL history.
He performed a medley of “Not Afraid,” “Without Me,” a Detroit-themed rewrite of “Stan,” and closed with an explosive “Lose Yourself” that ended with fireworks spelling “DETROIT VS EVERYBODY” across the roof of Ford Field.
The television broadcast cut to commercial late because the performance ran long, and NBC’s cameras couldn’t stop showing aerial shots of fans screaming the lyrics word-for-word.
Within minutes, #ThanksgivingHalftime was the number-one trending topic worldwide. Clips racked up tens of millions of views in hours.
Former Lions players, Michigan celebrities, and even Governor Gretchen Whitmer posted reactions calling it “the greatest halftime show never planned.” By Friday morning, petitions on Change.org demanding “Eminem for Super Bowl LX” had gathered over 300,000 signatures.
That momentum collided head-on with the lingering resentment many American football fans still harbor toward the league’s decision to book Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican reggaeton and Latin-trap superstar, as the first solo Spanish-language headliner in Super Bowl history.
When the NFL and Roc Nation announced him in September, the reaction was sharply divided along cultural and generational lines. Older and more traditional fans grumbled that the Super Bowl should feature “American artists” on “America’s biggest stage.” Younger and Latino audiences celebrated the milestone representation.
The debate never fully died down, but Eminem’s Thanksgiving detonation poured rocket fuel on it.
Conservative commentators and sports radio hosts spent Black Friday declaring that the Detroit performance “proved” the NFL had made a mistake.
Outlets like OutKick and Barstool ran headlines such as “Eminem Just Ended Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Dreams” and “NFL Has No Choice Now.” Social media amplified the narrative further, with AI-generated images of Eminem on the Super Bowl stage and fake press releases claiming the league had “quietly informed Roc Nation of the change.” Some posts using the phrase “It’s official” garnered millions of impressions even though no credible reporter had confirmed anything of the sort.
On Saturday, NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero jokingly tweeted “Your move, Bad Bunny” alongside a clip of Eminem’s performance, and that single post was screen-captured and shared as “proof” the decision was imminent.
By Sunday, international tabloids and even some local TV stations in Latin America were running the story as fact, forcing Bad Bunny’s team to issue a brief statement on Sunday night: “See you in New Orleans. Boricua hasta el final.”
Behind the scenes, sources close to the Super Bowl production tell a very different story. The halftime show is a co-production between the NFL, Roc Nation, and now Apple Music, and contracts are signed many months in advance with massive financial penalties for cancellation.
Changing a headliner less than ten weeks before the event would cost tens of millions of dollars and trigger complex legal battles.
Moreover, the league has spent the fall heavily promoting Bad Bunny across Spanish-language media partners like Univision and Telemundo, with promotional shoots already completed in Puerto Rico and Los Angeles.
One league executive, speaking anonymously, laughed off the rumors: “We’re not scrapping an entire multicultural marketing campaign because Eminem decided to surprise his hometown on Thanksgiving. That was an incredible moment for Detroit, but the Super Bowl is a global event.
Bad Bunny moves the needle in ways most American artists simply don’t anymore.”
Streaming data backs that up. Bad Bunny was the most-streamed artist in the world for the third consecutive year in 2024, with over 19 billion streams on Spotify alone. Eminem, while still a legend, ranked 67th.
In the crucial 18–34 demographic in the United States, Bad Bunny outperforms Eminem by a factor of three. For a league desperate to grow its audience in Latin America and among younger viewers, those numbers matter far more than viral Thanksgiving moments.
That hasn’t stopped the wishful thinking. Some fans have suggested a compromise: keep Bad Bunny but add Eminem as a special guest for one or two songs. Given that Eminem has performed at the Super Bowl before (the iconic 2022 show with Dr.
Dre, Snoop, Kendrick, and 50 Cent), he is already in the Rolodex. Roc Nation has pulled off similar surprises in the past; Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar were unannounced until show night in 2022.
For now, though, the NFL remains publicly silent, letting the rumor mill spin itself out. Bad Bunny himself broke his silence on Instagram Monday morning with a simple photo of the Superdome captioned “2/8/26” and the Puerto Rican flag. Within hours it became his most-liked post ever.
So no, the NFL has not replaced Bad Bunny with Eminem. Not yet, and very likely not ever.
But for one shining Thanksgiving afternoon in Detroit, Eminem reminded everyone why he’s considered by many the greatest live performer of his generation, and in the court of public opinion, that was enough to make the impossible feel, for a moment, inevitable.
Whether the league ultimately bends to that pressure remains one of the most fascinating storylines heading into the 2025 playoffs.
