The Detroit Lions announced on Sunday, November 1, that Wu-Tang Clan will headline the Thanksgiving Day halftime show on Thursday, November 26, when the Lions host the Chicago Bears at Ford Field in Detroit. The game is the Lions 87th annual Thanksgiving Day Classic, with kickoff scheduled for 1 p.m. Eastern time and the game televised nationally on CBS. Antonio Cipriano will sing the national anthem before the game.
Eminem and his longtime manager Paul Rosenberg are executive producing the halftime show and helped select the performers, in the second year of their partnership with the Lions. Rosenberg said the booking fits the kind of exciting and unexpected performance the partnership aims to bring to Detroit, and noted that he and Eminem have followed the group since the early 1990s, along with a generation of Detroit football fans.
The booking arrives in a milestone year for the Wu-Tang Clan. Wu-Tang Clan was named to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class of 2026, with the induction ceremony scheduled for November 14 in Los Angeles. The group is also wrapping its global farewell tour, Wu-Tang Forever: The Final Chamber.
Last year Jack White headlined the Lions Thanksgiving halftime show, with Eminem as a special guest. This year the stage belongs to one of hip hop's most influential groups, bringing a legendary catalog to one of the biggest regular season stages in football.
No setlist or performance length was announced with the booking. Fans can watch live at Ford Field or on the CBS broadcast, and The Talk Lounge will keep readers posted as more show details are announced.
The group formed on Staten Island in 1992 and changed hip hop with its 1993 debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), a record that built a whole universe of slang, samples and street mythology. More than three decades later, the catalog still fills arenas, and the Thanksgiving stage puts that catalog in front of one of the largest television audiences of the regular season. For Detroit, the booking is also a homecoming of sorts: Eminem and Rosenberg have spent two years shaping the Lions halftime show, and this year they hand the stage to a group they have followed since the early 1990s.
