Bad Bunny finds his fire as he gears up for first movie lead role

From halftime euphoria to a Caribbean western with teeth.

There are pop stars, and then there is Bad Bunny, a man who treats scale like a casual accessory. Weeks after bending the Super Bowl halftime stage to his will, Benito is trading pyrotechnics for period dust, setting his first lead film role in Porto Rico, an “epic Caribbean western” about the island’s contested beginnings. If the title feels deliberately old-world, that’s the point: history, reclaimed and re-spelled.

The film marks the feature directing debut of Residente, born René Pérez Joglar, who co-wrote the script with Alexander Dinelaris, the Oscar-winning pen behind Birdman and The Revenant. Executive producing is Alejandro González Iñárritu, which is to say, subtlety is not on the menu. The cast reads like a global summit, Edward Norton, Javier Bardem, Viggo Mortensen, all orbiting a story described as visceral, iconic, and unafraid to interrogate the American myth. Norton, never one to undersell a thesis, likened the film’s ambition to The Godfather and Gangs of New York: operatic, shadowed, morally bruised.

For Bad Bunny, the leap feels inevitable. He has flirted with film before, stylish turns in Bullet Train and Caught Stealing, but Porto Rico places him squarely at the narrative center. Produced under 1868 Studios, a venture backed by Sony Music Latin and Sony Music Vision, and supported by Live Nation Studios, the project arrives at a moment when Benito’s cultural capital is peaking.

His recent Super Bowl performance drew an average of 128.2 million viewers, per Nielsen, and earlier this month he became the first Spanish-language artist to win album of the year at the Grammy Awards for Debí Tirar Más Fotos.

A poet of rhythm stepping into a story about roots. A rapper in a western about reckoning. If this is a flame meeting dynamite, as Norton suggested, then cinema may want to brace itself.