In February, the Super Bowl LVII between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles is now officially ranked as the most-watched ever.
After review of the game viewership numbers by USA Today, this would mean that Rihanna’s performance also has become the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show on record, accumulating 121 million views.
Before that, the Super Bowl 49 was the most-viewed game, which had the New England Patriots against the Seattle Seahawks bringing in 114.4 million people in 2015.
While the 2023 viewership was originally 113.06 million, reports on Monday went over the data again adding another 2 percent to the Super Bowl LVII’s total views. It was said the numbers were warped due to an external encoding issue and a firmware upgrade.
“There were two separate issues, each of them accounting for an additional one million viewers,” Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports executive vice president and head of strategy and analytics, told Variety.
Despite the accomplishment, Rihanna’s show did receive 103 complaints from the Federal Communications Commission. Many of the complaints stated that the pop star’s performance was graphic and pornographic in nature, critics seemed to find fault with everything from her lyrics to choreography.
While this live performance was Rihanna’s first in more than five years, she not only revealed she was pregnant with partner and rapper A$AP Rocky’s second child but also performed her Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hits like “Only Girl (in the World), “We Found Love,” “S&M,” “Rude Boy,” and more.
Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty lingerie and clothing brand sold “Rihanna concert interrupted by a football game, weird but whatever” T-shirts as part of its game day collection. And considering millions more people tuned into her “concert” than the game, there’s truth to that slogan.
