Deadline traces how Michael Jackson, Elvis and Apple’s Mac helped reshape Super Bowl halftime shows

The Super Bowl halftime show has long operated as more than a midgame concert, it has become a high-profile national stage where music, celebrity and media production converge for mass audiences. In a Deadline feature published August 5, the outlet looks at how three cultural and technological moments, including Michael Jackson, Elvis and the Apple Macintosh, helped set expectations for what a halftime performance could look and sound like, and how it reaches viewers at scale.

Deadline’s account also places the halftime-show conversation in a broader 2026 entertainment context. The piece notes that only weeks earlier, the FIFA World Cup celebrated the midway mark at the final in New Jersey with a lineup that included BTS, Madonna, Justin Bieber, Coldplay and The Muppets’ Electric Mayhem band. It says Electric Mayhem performed a cover of White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army,” illustrating how major sports spectacles have increasingly treated halftime and in-stadium segments as headline cultural events.

At the center of Deadline’s argument is the idea that the Super Bowl’s halftime show has repeatedly borrowed tools and formats from across entertainment history. The feature describes Michael Jackson as one of the central figures in shaping how pop superstardom could be translated into a stadium-scale television moment, with performance and spectacle designed for viewers watching both in person and at home.

Deadline also points to Elvis as another benchmark in the evolving relationship between mainstream music and sports-broadcast audiences. The outlet frames the Elvis reference as part of a longer chain of expectations about recognizable stars, broad appeal and performance styles that can hold attention in a condensed live window, particularly when the event is simultaneously a media event and a cultural one.

Beyond performers, Deadline ties the evolution of halftime to technological change, highlighting Apple’s Mac as a representative of how new media production and presentation methods can affect what audiences see and how quickly trends spread across platforms. In the feature’s telling, these shifts contribute to a halftime-show format that increasingly looks and feels like a modern entertainment production rather than a traditional stadium intermission.

The article does not suggest a single template for the halftime show’s future, but it does underscore that the most visible sports-stage performances are often the ones that reflect the entertainment industry’s current priorities, from artist branding to stagecraft and from television pacing to music selection. With major sports properties continuing to schedule top-tier entertainment segments at national scale, the halftime-show model is likely to remain a focal point for how the entertainment business measures visibility during high-volume live viewing.