By the numbers: Bad Bunny, Melania and a break in the winter freeze
In this piece:
Bad Bunny smashes records with his halftime performance at the Super Bowl; Kid Rock and TPUSA humiliated
“Melania” sales drop by a shocking 67%, putting the film on track to be the biggest box-office bomb since Gigli (2003)
The Winter Freeze that shut down much of the Mid-Atlantic finally eases
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Bad Bunny pulls second-highest ratings ever
The Seattle Seahawks defeated the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026 — a 29-13 victory that marked Seattle’s second championship in franchise history and its first since 2014.
Of course, for anyone who isn’t a Patriots fan, that outcome alone was cause for celebration: New England remains one of the most disliked franchises in the NFL, second only to the Dallas Cowboys.
But even beyond the game, the real cultural moment came at halftime — and it wasn’t delivered by a rival “alternative Super Bowl show” with known pedophile Kid Rock.
Bad Bunny’s halftime performance was an undeniable success.
The Puerto Rican star headlined a medley of his biggest hits at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, delivered entirely in Spanish, and celebrated Latin music and culture on one of the world’s largest broadcast stages. Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin joined him, with celebrity appearances from the likes of Pedro Pascal and Jessica Alba adding even more star power.
The cultural resonance was immediate, this halftime show wasn’t just a musical performance, it was a cultural declaration, blending reggaeton with salsa, bomba, plena, and pop, and it connected deeply with a global audience.
And the numbers back that up: early estimates show over 127 million viewers tuned in to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, making it now the second-most watched halftime performance in the event’s history. Some outlets have even reported figures above 135 million, which would make it the most-watched halftime show ever recorded.
Contrast that with the so-called “alternative” halftime show staged by Turning Point USA and headlined by known pedophile Kid Rock: despite heavy promotion, that event drew only a tiny fraction of the Super Bowl audience with estimates of roughly 4–5 million viewers total, barely 4 percent of the Bud Bunny audience.
The contrast could not be sharper:
Bad Bunny commanded a global audience measured in the hundreds of millions. The Kid Rock/Turning Point show registered as a desperate, humiliating, niche counterprogramming event with minimal reach even among MAGA’s most racist viewers..
In other words, while some pundits spent the week bragging about an “All-American” alternative halftime spectacle, the real halftime show — culturally, musically, and in sheer viewership — belonged to Bad Bunny.
Melania Tanks: Another MAGA Culture Project Craters on Impact
By its second weekend in theaters, Melania did what so many MAGA-aligned “culture” projects do best: collapse under the weight of its own hype.
Amazon invested $40 million just to purchase the film, and another $35 million to promote it. To date, the film has brought in less than $10 million — marking a $65 million loss.
After a brief opening fueled largely by curiosity and partisan loyalty, ticket sales fell off a cliff, dropping by roughly two-thirds in week two, a decline so steep it places the film among the most notorious box-office failures of the modern era.
With an 8% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the lowest IMDB rating of all time, Melania’s humiliating run shows how detached the MAGA movement has become from regular Americans.
Industry observers have already begun comparing its trajectory to Gigli (2003), the film so catastrophically received it became a permanent punchline in Hollywood shorthand.
And unlike Gigli, this wasn’t a romantic comedy that simply missed the mark. Melania was marketed as a “cultural event” — a prestige documentary meant to “set the record straight,” reshape a public image, and energize a political base. Instead, it revealed a harsher truth: there is no broad audience appetite for MAGA grievance dressed up as art.
The film’s choice of director only sharpened that disconnect. Director Brett Ratner is a figure long associated with Hollywood’s reckoning era — a filmmaker whose career effectively collapsed following multiple, well-documented allegations of sexual misconduct, leading studios to sever ties and major projects to evaporate.
Ratner, who lives on stolen land in Palestine, was close to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and was recently identified in a photo released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R. 4405) in which he is groping an underage girl.
Whatever one thinks of the film’s subject, Ratner’s involvement — while largely ignored by the mainstream media — ensured Melania arrived already weighed down by reputational baggage that alienated mainstream audiences before the first ticket was sold.
The result was predictable. Critics panned it. Casual viewers ignored it. And even sympathetic audiences failed to show up in numbers remotely capable of justifying its reported production and marketing costs. A project intended to rehabilitate an image instead became a case study in how thoroughly MAGA culture projects misread the country.
That same miscalculation played out, almost comically, during Super Bowl weekend.
On one side: inclusive, modern, culturally fluent entertainment that understands what America actually looks like in 2026.
On the other: loud, resentful, nostalgia-soaked counter-programming built on the assumption that grievance alone is a substitute for talent, relevance, or joy.
In other words: Fight woke, go broke.
Both Melania and the TPUSA/Kid Rock spectacle failed for the same reason: they weren’t rejected because they were “too controversial.” They were rejected because they were boring, bitter, and out of touch.
This isn’t censorship.
It isn’t cancellation.
It’s the market delivering a verdict.
MAGA loves that, right?
America doesn’t want heavy-handed MAGA propaganda masquerading as art. It doesn’t want scolding nationalism sold as entertainment. And it doesn’t want to be lectured by people who confuse outrage with substance.
When given a choice between celebration and resentment, between creativity and grievance, the audience keeps choosing the same way.
And no amount of branding, counter-programming, or manufactured culture war can change that.
Mid-Atlantic Freeze Finally Breaks
The Mid-Atlantic region has been locked under persistent cold, heavy snow, and thick ice, with snowpacks that have compacted and bonded to surfaces since January 23.
Recent snowfall totals across the tri-state, including NYC, were significant enough that the Hudson River iced over and ferry service was suspended, underscoring how deeply snow and ice have materialized across the urban landscape.
In the greater DMV area, we are now approaching the first stretch of consecutive daytime highs above freezing, with temperatures climbing into the 40s this week. Even so, overnight lows below 32 °F on many nights will allow any surface melt to refreeze rapidly, meaning that bare pavement and ice-free sidewalks will remain the exception, not the rule
Meanwhile in New York City, the forecast through the coming week continues to reflect this cold-to-marginal melt pattern:
Highs in NYC are expected to rise from the 30s into the upper 30s and low 40s around mid-week — a modest thaw relative to the deep freeze we’ve just endured.
Nights still dip back toward the upper teens to mid-20s in many locations, which means any snowpack thaw during the daytime will re-bond as slick ice overnight.
There’s also a small chance of additional snow or mixed precipitation later in the week, keeping the surface energy balance complicated.
Across southern New England and upstate New York, black ice advisories have already been issued where daytime snowmelt has refrozen on roadways and bridges — a classic example of the “thaw by day / freeze by night” cycle that prolongs hazardous surfaces long after the big snow event.
The key thing to understand from the forecast data is this: above-freezing air temperatures do not magically erase weeks of cold-season accumulation. Snow that has been on the ground through repeated sub-freezing cycles becomes dense, layered, and ice-rich.
Each day the sun and warmer air manage to penetrate a bit deeper, but with nights still cold and even more flurries possible, that melt layer tends to refreeze from the base up, often creating a protective crust of ice — not a disappearance of snow cover.
That’s why even though Silver Spring’s forecast shows multiple consecutive days with highs above freezing, and New York City’s forecast shows a temporary drift into the upper 30s/low 40s, neither place should expect all remnants of snow and ice to be gone by Friday.
The snowpack’s thermal inertia — especially where deep, compacted snow and ice have existed for weeks — ensures that melt will be gradual, punctuated by renewed overnight refreeze and ongoing pockets of wintery precipitation.
So think of this week’s warm-thawed layers as the first gentle “unzippering” of winter, not a sudden end to it. Old ice doesn’t instantly melt because the air gets a few degrees warmer; it melts because the snowpack loses enough cold content over several days that it can finally dissipate the reservoir of frost it has accumulated. Given the forecasts for both the Mid-Atlantic and New York City through next week, we’re only beginning that process — not concluding it.