On the Monday after the Calgary Stampede closed, the cowboy hats were gone from the grounds and the people left on the midway wore work boots. Crews from North American Midway Entertainment were folding up rides for the highway run north to Edmonton, where K-Days opened four days later. That morning the Stampede had posted its final count: 1,411,954 guests over 10 days.
That number reads differently in Fort Worth, because Calgary is the other Cowtown and the man running its Stampede used to run the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Closer to home, Fort Worth’s own Stock Show also finished its 2026 run smaller, for reasons anyone who spent late January in North Texas will remember.
Line the two cities’ years up and the newer Alberta trends come into focus. Both rodeo crowds shrank in 2026, for different reasons. The new rules were writteWn for screens instead: a film credit that pays extra for shooting in open country and now covers game shows, and a regulated online casino market, open since that same Monday, that launched under standards keeping bonus offers out of public advertising. Texas has written screen rules of its own, and Fort Worth is collecting on them.
The Stampede Lost 60,000 Visitors in Good Weather
Calgary’s total was about 60,000 below 2025’s 1,470,288, Global News reported, and that year had already finished about 7,700 short of the record 1,477,953 set in 2024. A second straight dip would be easy to pin on rain. This summer’s weather, as CTV put it in its report on the final count, was exceptionally good.
The free part of the show set a record. An estimated 315,000 people lined downtown for the opening-day parade, the biggest crowd in its history, LiveWire Calgary reported. Four of the 10 days on the grounds were free to enter, and the Stampede’s caravan spent the week flipping pancakes and hauling a portable stage around the city for people who never made it to the park.
The Stampede’s chief executive, Joel Cowley, argues the gate count isn’t the point. “Attendance isn’t the sole measure of success, and in fact, I would argue that it’s not the most important measure of success,” he said, pointing to mid-week surveys in which 86 percent of those asked said they would be back. That’s a convenient yardstick for a show whose count is slipping. It’s also a fair one in a year when, by his own description, affordability worries had dogged Canadians for some time.
He brought his Houston rodeo experience to Calgary in 2021, and during this year’s show he and his wife became Canadian citizens. A Fort Worth fan who makes the trip north is in thin company: about 70 percent of guests came from the Calgary area, by Cowley’s mid-week figures, and only 2 percent from the U.S.
An Ice Storm Took a Bite Out of Fort Worth’s Crowd
The Stock Show’s 23-day run earlier this year drew 1,012,925 visitors, down 250,995 from a year earlier, the outdoor amusement trade site Carnival Warehouse reported. Sleet started piling up on the show’s second Friday, and freezing rain came and went for about 36 hours. The temperature stayed below freezing for 58 straight hours, according to Matt Brockman, the show’s communications manager.
The trade site tied roughly 195,000 of the lost visitors directly to that five-day stretch, which landed on what is usually one of the show’s busiest weekends. “Unlike 2025, we experienced five days of adverse weather,” Brockman said. Strip those 195,000 out and the rest of the drop, about 56,000, sits close to Calgary’s decline. His caveat matters, though: the storm’s effects lingered, and attendance didn’t get back to normal until the last five days of the run.
The show didn’t stand still otherwise. The 90-year-old Will Rogers Coliseum reopened after a $50.5 million renovation that kept its 1936 art deco look, and the rodeo tried two new formats, a rookie rally and a collegiate finals. The marketing team leaned on short-form video, posting the midway and the arena action while the show was still running.
Fort Worth’s dip has a weather report attached. Calgary’s came in sunshine, which makes it the number both shows should watch, even if two soft summers after a record are thin evidence.
The Film Credit Pays More for Open Country
Alberta’s screen business leans on its film and television tax credit, a refundable credit launched in 2020. Productions apply at a 22 or 30 percent rate on eligible Alberta costs, and one route to the higher rate is shooting at least 75 percent of Alberta principal photography days away from Edmonton and Calgary, in areas the program defines as rural or remote.
The province keeps standing in for the American frontier. Netflix’s The Abandons, a western set in 1850s Oregon, began filming in Calgary in 2024 and reached the service late last year. In spring 2025, CBC reported, the third season of Billy the Kid, an MGM+ western, was shooting around Calgary. Not every job is a period piece: HBO turned downtown Calgary post-apocalyptic for The Last of Us, and Heartland, the long-running ranch drama filmed in High River, began its 20th season on CBC Gem on October 4.
The province says the credit and its media fund have paid out for more than 380 productions since 2020, generating more than C$1.6 billion in spending. The work comes in waves, though. In spring 2025 the head of the Calgary local of IATSE, the film crew union, said only about 65 percent of its 1,500-plus available members were working, and asked for the 22 percent base to rise to 25. It hasn’t.
What changed this year was the format list. On June 17, at a media festival in Banff, the province moved the credit and the media fund under its arts ministry and said the credit would open to unscripted television and game shows, with this year’s budget putting more than C$65 million into the sector. Shiny-floor studio formats now sit next to the westerns on the eligible list.
Alberta’s Online Casinos Opened Without Public Bonus Ads
A day after the Banff announcement, AGLC, the provincial gaming regulator, issued the advertising section of its standards for registered online gaming operators. It reads advertising broadly, from newspapers and radio to email, social media, television, the internet and signage, and outside two narrow exceptions it bars ads that communicate bonuses, credits or other inducements, algorithm-driven ones included.
The market those standards govern officially opened on July 13, the same Monday the Stampede’s rides headed north. Ontario, the other province that lets private operators in, has worked under the same kind of limit since its market opened in 2022.
Those exceptions leave a registered operator two ways to put a bonus in front of an Albertan: its own gaming platform, and emails, texts and direct messages the player has expressly opted into and can opt out of at any time. Even then, an offer that requires the player to stake their own money can’t be billed as free, and its material conditions have to appear the first time it’s shown.
That two-province limit also shapes coverage of Canadian casino promotions. A reader looking for the best alberta online casino promotions on Bonus.com finds offers listed only for provinces outside Ontario and Alberta, and a section on those two provinces that explains why: each province’s regulator sets its own bonus and advertising rules.
Texas Set Aside $300 Million Every Two Years for Film
Fort Worth put rodeo on the air early. By the Stock Show’s own account, its rodeo was broadcast live on NBC radio through WBAP in 1932, and in 1958 it became the first rodeo to get complete live national television coverage. The screen work the city chases now is scripted, and the state pays to attract it, as Alberta does.
Texas wrote its version in 2025, when Senate Bill 22 became law without Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature. The law has the state comptroller put $300 million into a film incentive fund every two-year budget cycle, and a feature or non-reality TV series that spends at least $1.5 million in Texas can get a grant of 25 percent of that spending.
Like Alberta, Texas pays extra for open country: another 2.5 percent of in-state spending if at least 35 percent of filming days happen in a county of 300,000 people or fewer. Reality TV, the format Alberta added to its credit in June, gets a base grant of no more than 10 percent under the Texas law.
The shows came first, starting with Taylor Sheridan’s. His work with the city’s film commission began with a Yellowstone horseback scene in 2021 and grew into 1883, Lioness and Landman, among others, according to a published account of a January forecast event at TCU where film commissioner Taylor Hardy spoke. SGS Studios, which Sheridan founded, opened a 450,000-square-foot studio complex at AllianceTexas with developer Hillwood, built for four large productions at once, and the second season of Landman started filming there early in 2025.
The payroll is large. Landman’s second season hired 1,092 crew members, 192 cast and more than 2,500 extras, she told Spectrum News, which reported in August that production had wrapped on Frisco King and a third season of Lioness. Not everyone is satisfied: one North Texas crew member on Lioness told the station off camera that they wanted more local hiring.
Calgary Gets the Next Big Crowd
The Grey Cup, Canadian football’s championship game, will be played at McMahon Stadium in Calgary on November 15. The Stock Show’s next run opens January 15, close enough to drive to, ice permitting, and the Stampede comes back in July.
Cowley’s surveys found that 24 percent of the guests asked were at their first Stampede, and he says it’s the out-of-town visitors who generate the show’s economic impact on the city. Whether a Fort Worth reader joins that first-timer share next summer, or waits for January at Will Rogers, is the one choice neither show’s numbers can make for them.
