Jennifer Lopez Said Her Popularity Was the Reason ‘Gigli’ Flopped

Jennifer Lopez starred in Gigli in 2003, a film that still sits as her lowest rated on Rotten Tomatoes over two decades later. While Lopez acknowledged that the film didn’t receive the reception she wanted, she didn’t think it was as bad as people believed. She thought the biggest problem for the film was that not enough people saw it. This was something she attributed to her own popularity.

Jennifer Lopez said her level of fame was not good for ‘Gigli’

Gigli was met with near-universal ridicule upon its release. Lopez thought this was unfortunate, as she believed parts of the film were “genius.” She hoped people would come to view the film the same way once they saw it on television.

“I really think it will have a resurgence on cable!” she told W Magazine in 2003. “Now people may look at me and say, ‘She’s totally off her f***ing rocker,’ but hey, that’s my theory.”

Lopez thought the film fared terribly in theaters because people were fed up with hearing about her. At the time, her relationship with Ben Affleck was constantly on the cover of tabloids.

“But if you’re in the paper every damn day, people are like, ‘Who cares?’ And then nobody goes to see your movie!” she said. “It’s like, ‘Why should we? We see her every day,’ and then you’re like, ‘Wait a minute! That’s the only reason I’m doing this!’”

Ben Affleck said his relationship with Jennifer Lopez hurt the success of ‘Gigli’

Affleck agreed with Lopez’s assessment. He thought their romantic relationship overshadowed the film entirely.

“It’s just that it became a story in and of itself,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “The funny name, the Jennifer Lopez romance and overexposure of that, it was kind of a perfect storm.”

Affleck felt that this was “the worst of both worlds.” He was so famous that his private life had all but evaporated, but this didn’t translate to high ticket sales.

“Jennifer and I happened to be together at a time where the whole industry of celebrity journalism, if you want to call it that, sort of exploded,” he said. “But I thought, “S***, this is really not how I had hoped to go, where I’m going to be, what? Famous for being an a**hole or a failure and not able to work?”

The film’s director had nothing positive to say about it

The director of Gigli, Martin Brest, didn’t have any particularly positive thoughts to share about it. 

“Of all the movies that I’ve worked on, I know them inside and out. I don’t even know what that movie looks like, frankly, because of the manner in which it took shape,” he told Variety. “Even the name … I refer to it as ‘the G movie.’ Probably the less said about it the better.”

Brest said that the original vision for the film barely resembled the finished product. Still, he blamed himself for the result and said it deserved to be decimated at the box office.

“The themes of the movie were radically different. The plot was different. The purpose of the movie was different. But I can’t escape blame,” he said. “[But] it’s so weird — I literally don’t remember the movie that was released, because I wasn’t underneath it in the way I was under the hood of all my other movies. So it’s really a bloody mess that deserved its excoriation.”