How Long is the Super Bowl Halftime Show?

The length of a regular season halftime is 12 minutes, but that's for the plain old regular season ... boooring. With Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing, along with whatever else happens, you can expect this Sunday's halftime show to take around 30 or 35 minutes. The performance itself usually lasts around 13 or 14 minutes, but once you factor in everything else (commercials, a healthy dose of game analysis, etc.), you're looking at something closer to a half hour. 

The Super Bowl halftime show has been a part of the event ever since the first Super Bowl was played in 1967. However, for most of the time since then, the performers were college marching bands with the occasional star like Ella Fitzgerald or Mike Rooney thrown in. It wasn't until the early '90s that halftime break became the spectacle we know now with performers like New Kids on the Block, Gloria Estefan and Michael Jackson. Of course, that eventually grew and grew until we ended up with 2004's "wardrobe malfunction," bringing us back to classic rockers like Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.