Two Bad Bunny hot takes in consecutive weeks?
You better believe it. That’s the power of Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio.
It’s been several days since the 31-year-old Puerto Rican singer took the stage at the Super Bowl XL halftime show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, and he’s still dominating the online conversation. Bad Bunny might not have broken the internet, but he’s certainly kept the think piece engine firing on all cylinders. Some have been really good — I’m biased, but I particularly liked this De Los piece by Tatiana Tenreyro — while others have been completely off the mark.
The verdict is in: Latinos won this round of the culture war.
With a very nuanced performance rooted in Puerto Rican working-class history, it was bursting with countless “if you get it, you get it” moments that, well, not everyone got — Bad Bunny demonstrated that he is the world’s brightest star. Meanwhile, Kid Rock bawitdaba’d his way into the dustbin of history.
But Sunday night’s biggest winner wasn’t Bad Bunny or Latinos. It was the National Football League. By booking the newly minted album of the year Grammy winner, the NFL made it clear that it’s not only courting Latino fans, but also playing the long game when it comes to global expansion.
According to NBC, the network that broadcast the game, the matchup between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots drew in nearly 125 million viewers, the second highest figure for a Super Bowl (last year’s game set the record, with 127.7 million viewers). The halftime show itself drew 128.8 million viewers. As of this writing, international viewership figures have yet to be released, but given that Bad Bunny is the most streamed artist in the world, I assume those figures are astronomical.
Bad Bunny leads the Super Bowl LX halftime show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on Feb. 8.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Not a bad result for the most politicized halftime show performer in the history of the Super Bowl.
For Xavier Gutierrez, that the NFL stuck with Bad Bunny despite the initial backlash is indicative of the inclusive nature of sports. Gutierrez is the co-founder of Latinos in Sports, an organization that focuses on highlighting the contributions of the Latino community to sports leagues and is actively working to place more Latinos in the front offices of professional teams.
“If you look at the time that we’re living in right now in which there are people basically saying to this community, you don’t belong. You know who’s not saying that? Sports,” he said. “Teams are saying, ‘You are welcomed, we see you, we need you and we want you to be a part of everything that we are doing.’”
Gutierrez knows firsthand about what professional teams are thinking. In a past life, he served as chief executive of the Arizona Coyotes, the first Latino CEO in the history of the NHL.
Of course the Bad Bunny pick wasn’t made out of benevolence. It was out of self-interest. To paraphrase Benito, the NFL’s zodiac sign is $.
The NFL is the most profitable sports league in the world, but it isn’t the most watched (that honor belongs to the English Premier League). An audience of nearly 125 million people in the U.S. is certainly impressive, but it pales in comparison to the 1.5 billion people that tuned in to watch the 2022 FIFA World Cup final match between Argentina and France. American football still has a lot of space to grow at the global scale.
The NFL is aware of this, and has made a concerted effort to expand abroad. The league has been scheduling regular season games internationally since 2005 (the first one was in Mexico). Earlier this month, it announced that nine regular seasons games would be played abroad — three in London, and one in Rio De Janeiro, Mexico City, Melbourne, Munich, Madrid and Paris.
In 2022, the NFL launched the global markets program, which grants NFL teams “international marketing rights to build brand awareness and fandom beyond the U.S., through fan engagement, events, commercial opportunities and NFL Flag development.” All 32 NFL franchises are participating in the program, and the league is focusing on 21 countries.
Booking Benito for the halftime show is part of this international expansion effort. He the most culturally relevant artist on the planet, and an economic and marketing force. Bad Bunny’s “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” monthlong residency in San Juan, Puerto Rico, generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the island. Anything and everything branded with Bad Bunny’s name is a license to print money. Leading up Sunday’s game, the NFL and el conejo malo released a sought after limited edition Super Bowl-specific merchandise line.
Not only is el sapo concho an emblem of Puerto Rican resilience; for $100, it can also be your favorite NFL team’s new mascot. (This is not a knock, by the way. As a self-identified mark, I will admit that I doled out $60 for a T-shirt that re-creates the cover of “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” on the gridiron.)
“I think it was the right move, just as a business person. Of course that’s who I’m going to ask,” Gutierrez said of Bad Bunny. “From a business perspective, you want a global audience, you want to be culturally relevant and you want the one who is dominating all the platforms. My question to you is: who gets asked next year in L.A. [for Super Bowl LXI]?”
If we’re sticking with a global strategy, I’d say BTS. K-Pop is massive.
“It’s a great example of the league putting their money where their mouth is. They want to say they value the Hispanic community, they want to say they value Latinos, it’s the perfect way to show it,” Will Hernandez, offensive lineman for the Arizona Cardinals, said of the Bad Bunny choice.
“Not just that, but everything they’re doing [internationally] is huge too. All the camps they do in Mexico, all the seminars they do out there, all the time and money they’re investing into these countries. I think that’s exactly what we want to see. And it’s proven, too, that Latinos are giving it right back by elevating the game.”
Congratulations, NFL! Booking Bad Bunny to play the halftime Super Bowl has singlehandedly made up for that questionable “eñe”/ “Por la cultura” campaign.
— Fidel Martinez
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RIP to L.A. Times writer Jeanette Marantos
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
Our colleague Jeanette Marantos died on Feb. 7, following an emergency heart issue. She was 70.
She was a longtime contributor to the Features department and helped lead The Times’ plant coverage, writing the L.A. Times Plants newsletter.
Dedicated to her craft and a true plant lover, Marantos was at the California Native Plant Society’s conference in Riverside the day before she died.
Aside from being a brilliant reporter for The Times for more than 10 years, Marantos was a loving and dedicated partner, mother and grandparent.
She cared for her husband, Steven B. Smith, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2011 and died in 2021, providing readers with tips from their experiences. She spoke often of her sons and grandchildren and her dogs.
“She was the most loving person I ever met, probably to a fault in some cases. If she knew you and you were a part of her life, she was fiercely loyal always,” her son, Sascha Smith, told The Times.
Read The Times’ obituary for Marantos here and the L.A. plant community’s tributes to her here.
— Carlos De Loera
RIP James Van Der Beek + Colorectal cancer awareness
(Richard Shotwell / Invision / Associated Press)
Actor James Van Der Beek, who starred in the WB’s drama series “Dawson’s Creek” and the sports dramedy “Varsity Blues,” died Wednesday morning. He was 48.
The actor battled Stage 3 colorectal cancer, a condition he revealed in November 2024.
Van Der Beek is the second celebrity in the past few weeks whose death has been associated with colorectal disease. Earlier this week, it was revealed that “Schitt’s Creek” star Catherine O’Hara died of a pulmonary embolism, with rectal cancer listed as an underlying condition.
The “Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23” actor’s death is reminiscent of that of “Black Panther” star Chadwick Boseman, who died of colon cancer in 2020 at the age of 43.
A recent report from the American Cancer Society showed that colorectal cancer is the No. 1 cause of cancer-related deaths for people under the age of 50. This trend in recent years has made it so that since 2021 the official recommendation has been to get screened for colorectal cancer starting at age 45 instead of 50.
My colleague Gustavo Arellano recently wrote about his experience of getting a colonoscopy for this 47th birthday and why it was so vital for him as a Mexican American man.
“The damned disease especially plagues Mexican American men like me, and many aren’t getting screened,” he wrote. “Only 46% of us hombres are up to-date, compared with 60% of white men, 61% of Puerto Ricans and 49% of Central and South Americans, according to the American Cancer Society.”
Arellano added, “The stats are even worse when it comes to people in my age range: only 9% of Mexican Americans between 45 and 49 have checked in on our colons, compared with 20% of our white peers.”
You can read his full column about his experience with his first colonoscopy and the culturally specific aspects surrounding it here.
— CDL
Stories we read this week that we think you should read
Unless otherwise noted, stories below were published by the Los Angeles Times.