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Dolly, Creed, and ZZ Top: 20 artists that should play RodeoHouston in 2026

It's time for George Strait to return to RodeoHouston.

Photo by D. Foster

Now that the horses are back in the barn, the cows are back on the pasture, and the carnival is heading down the highway, we can start making our picks for RodeoHouston performers in 2026.

The 2025 season was marked by amazing Houston weather from start to finish, the grand debuts of Zach Top and Post Malone, a short and fiery set by Journey, and, oddly enough, no record concert crowds to beat out last year’s Jonas Brothers attendance of more than 75,000. No one cracked 72,000 in 2025, even though a handful came very close.

On Saturday, total attendance on the grounds was 199,220, a new single-day attendance record dating back to 2003. That included the Brooks & Dunn concert, too. Overall, HLSR set a new attendance record in 2025, with more than 2.7 million people through the gates (this month’s excellent weather certainly helped).

The lineup will be released in January 2026, but for now, here are our picks for next season without regard to budget or artist availability. (Editor’s note: Even though Craig went 0 for 10 last year, we think it's fun to contemplate who might be performing next year.)

Dolly Parton
It’s absurd that Parton hasn’t played Houston proper since December 2016 and hasn’t graced the rodeo stage since March 5, 1978. Other big acts on the schedule that year? Johnny Cash with June Carter and Conway Twitty with Loretta Lynn. While Parton still continues to make new music with the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, she’s said she’s done touring aside from special shows. Well, RodeoHouston is pretty dang special, we think.

Lainey Wilson
Wilson wowed me in 2024 and turned in the best performance on the schedule. By late 2025 and early 2026, she should also have some new material on tap.

Creed
In 2024, Creed’s alt-rock contemporaries Nickelback attracted a crowd of just over 75,000. This is a no-brainer for the elderly millennials and the Generation Alpha kids who can’t remember how badly we hated Creed throughout most of the 2000s. Come back, Scott Stapp; all is forgiven.

Los Tigres Del Norte
“Go Tejano Day” legends, they pulled in record audiences in 2019 and 2024.

Bun B
The unofficial mayor of Houston’s Black Heritage Day show has become a RodeoHouston institution. Bun is quickly becoming a lock for the Star Trail of Fame. What would he pull out for his fifth straight performance? There’s always Kendrick…

Megan Moroney
I had Moroney on my list for 2025, but she didn’t make the cut. She’s had one of the biggest years of anyone in country music, and this would be another notch in her blue belt. Kenny Chesney can vouch for her, too.

Chris Stapleton
Stapleton’s RodeoHouston appearances are easily some of the most impeccable performances of any season. The only pity is that they are only slightly over an hour long. I could watch him for six hours.

Zach Bryan
Bryan sold out NRG Stadium just last summer, and he’s now a stadium act. With ZB in town, the dive bars in Montrose and Midtown would be on high alert. We could see him posted up at Two Headed Dog, easy.

Sierra Ferrell
I would love to hear “Fox Hunt” coming from that rodeo stage. If you know, you know. She’s guested on some of the biggest albums of the past few years, and she’s beyond ready to stake her claim at RodeoHouston.

Zach Top
Top made quite the impression in 2025 and had one of the year's biggest crowds. There’s nowhere for Top to go but…farther to the top.

Morgan Wallen
Wallen has never played RodeoHouston. He might be too massive for the rodeo at this point, but this would be an easy sellout.

ZZ Top
Billy and Frank haven’t played RodeoHouston since 2017. Sadly, Dusty Hill won’t be with the boys this time around, but his spirit will undoubtedly be dancing in the aisles.

Cody Johnson
Hometown boy Johnson has a sturdy sound made for RodeoHouston. This would be his fifth time on the revolving stage.

Shania Twain
Can RodeoHouston pry Twain away from the Las Vegas strip? She last played RodeoHouston in 1999. That seems prehistoric.

The Red Clay Strays
One of the biggest success stories of the past year would attract a crowd as big as Turnpike Troubadours did in 2023 when they pulled in 74,657 true believers.

Journey
We’ll probably need to make up for the 2025 electrical fire under the stage sometime.

Shaboozey
It was a surprise that RodeoHouston didn’t land Shaboozey in 2025. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” has been the most ubiquitous song throughout the NRG complex this year. I swear I heard it on repeat at the carnival one Friday afternoon.

Teddy Swims
One of the best new voices in pop, a Friday night show from the Atlanta native would kill during spring break. He’d also nail a George Strait cover.

Nate Smith
With nearly 9 million listeners on Spotify — that’s good, right? — he could be an ideal weekday draw.

George Strait
King George’s influence was constant in 2025, with several artists, like Charley Crockett and Post Malone, putting their own spins on his classics. He’s not played NRG Stadium since 2022, so we’re due.

concert rodeohouston

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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