U2 Will Headline the NFL’s First Thanksgiving Eve Halftime Show on Netflix

Nearly 25 years after Bono revealed an American flag inside his jacket at the Super Bowl, U2 are headed back to the 50-yard line, this time the night before Thanksgiving. Netflix announced on Tuesday (Oct. 20) that the band will headline halftime at the NFL’s first-ever Thanksgiving Eve game, the Green Bay Packers against the Los Angeles Rams at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., on Nov. 25, Billboard reports. Kickoff is 8 p.m. ET, and the game streams live on Netflix.

None of the announcements names a song or a guest, though U2’s own site promises a milestone set with special guests for the band’s 50th year. Jesse Collins Entertainment is producing the show for Netflix and the NFL, Variety notes, and the league is billing the slot as “a new NFL holiday tradition.”

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The band is already warming up on record. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” the third single from Carnaval de Luz, arrived with a video by Anton Corbijn, shot in the California desert, that per U2.com satirizes the band as a religious cult where women do all the heavy lifting. Watch it below.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos made the pitch in a statement:

They don’t just perform, they deliver iconic moments audiences remember forever

Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, in a statement, Billboard

It is the next step in Netflix’s plan to turn NFL holidays into concerts. Beyoncé headlined the 2024 Christmas Day halftime, and last year’s Snoop’s Holiday Halftime Party brought Snoop Dogg, Lainey Wilson, Huntr/X and Andrea Bocelli to Minneapolis, per Variety. The booking also lands the same day Puck reported that Jay-Z picked himself to headline the Super Bowl LXI halftime, a report we covered that neither the NFL nor Roc Nation has confirmed, Deseret News notes.

For U2, it caps a year of 24 new songs and the 50th anniversary of the band’s formation in Dublin in 1976. Carnaval de Luz, their first album of new material in nine years, arrives Nov. 13, 12 days before the game. The 2027 world tour opens Feb. 23 in Mexico City with Beck and, U2.com says, marks the band’s first stadium shows since The Joshua Tree Tour ended in December 2019. Billboard adds that the band’s Las Vegas Sphere residency, which began in 2023, grossed $244.5 million across 40 shows, per Boxscore.

The Edge told The New York Times, as Deseret News relays, that the band thinks it might still write the best song of its career next week. Mark Nov. 13 for the album and Nov. 25 for the halftime show.