Alert – Clues from Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s steamy first encounter that show romance was doomed from day one

It’s a solid rule of thumb, when releasing a $75M crime rom-com aimed at broad international audiences, to pick a title that won’t prove entirely unpronounceable for a wide majority of punters.

But the phonetics for Gigli are so troublesome that Ben Affleck’s Larry Gigli, a low-end mob enforcer, must give a crash course in saying his name to strangers.

‘Rhymes with “really”,’ he keeps trying, with a long-suffering air.

So, ‘Jeely’ – the most notorious bomb of its day and the reason, perhaps, that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, like the movie they met on, were doomed from the very start.

Sony released Gigli with a sinking feeling in August 2003, but they already had reasons to be jittery. The film had been subject to a lavish crescendo of bad press.

Gigli was the most notorious bomb of its day, losing an estimated $119m

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Lopez wouldn’t commit early on when she was courted to play Ricki, a lesbian gangster, and was nearly replaced by Halle Berry, who can be forever grateful that scheduling conflicts on X2 gave her the opt-out.

Lopez was lured back after a planned thriller called Tick Tock, about terrorist bombings, was canceled in the wake of 9/11.

There was also the money. Her $12M salary, just $0.5M shy of what Affleck got, propelled her near the top end of Hollywood’s highest-paid actresses. Plus, she was given the sweetener of a back-end deal in the high single digits – that’s to say, a percentage of the profits.

Nobody yet surmised that these were going to add up to a long way less than zero.

All eyes were on Affleck and Lopez, who were rumored to be getting close on the shoot, even though Lopez had been married for mere months to Cris Judd, a Filipino dancer she’d met around the time of her breakup from Puff Daddy.

As the shoot wrapped in April 2002, Affleck took out a full-page trade ad complimenting Lopez as a costar. Then they were all cuddles at a surprise party for her 32nd birthday that July, just two days before she filed for divorce from Judd.

Larry Gigli and sultry Ricki are thrown together on a criminal assignment that turns into something like Get Shorty meets Rain Man

All eyes were on Affleck and Lopez, who were rumored to be getting close on the shoot

A summer of love followed – as evidenced in the Jenny from the Block video

A summer of love followed – as evidenced in the Jenny from the Block video, which premiered on MTV in November 2002. As they sunbathe on a luxury yacht, Affleck pats Lopez, smooches her on the behind, and undoes a string from her bikini.

Engagement followed swiftly, with Affleck whipping out a much-gawped-at 6.1-carat pink diamond ring that set him back around one-sixth of his Gigli salary.

The overexposure of its stars became the film’s worst enemy. But the real architect of this catastrophe, thus far unnamed, was the man who wrote, directed, and produced it: Martin Brest.

First, his script — a hard-to-swallow confection, guilty of trying too hard when it’s not causing active, jaw-dropping offense.

The plot goes something like this: The callow Larry Gigli and sultry Ricki, previously unacquainted, are thrown together on a criminal assignment that turns into something like Get Shorty meets Rain Man.

A New York Mob boss named Sparkman (played in a one-scene cameo by Al Pacino) is in trouble with a federal prosecutor, so he wants the latter’s young brother kidnapped to use him as leverage. Played by then 24-year-old unknown Justin Bartha, this is Brian, who has learning difficulties and lives in a care facility.

Then there’s the question of Ricki’s sexuality. She’s a lesbian, a fact elided in the trailer and marketing. 

Ricky is a lesbian, a fact elided in the trailer and marketing. But before we know it, Larry has managed to seduce her

The overexposure of its stars became the film’s worst enemy

Engagement followed swiftly, with Affleck whipping out a much-gawped-at 6.1-carat pink diamond ring that set him back around one-sixth of his Gigli salary

But before we know it, Larry has managed to seduce her.

For all the problems with the film, however, Lopez is warm and stunning in it.

Ricki, most of the way, is a delight. She sees through Larry immediately and keeps the upper hand, but gently; she oscillates between toying with him, and pitying him, and simply observing him, like an amateur shrink.

They don’t have romantic chemistry, as the reviews griped – but this is partly on purpose, because he’s idiotically smitten, and she finds him a sad specimen. It’s not as though they’re equally matched.

Gigli simply shouldn’t have been a rom-com.

The original ending was meant to be both mystical and tragic. The final moments, which they shot, had Larry bleeding to death on the beach, after a showdown with the cop played by Christopher Walken.

The filmmakers, alarmed at how poorly this all tested, did five weeks of reshoots and recut much of the last section, compressing the criminal intrigue while boosting the romance. This cost a lot more and still didn’t help.

‘The movie didn’t work,’ Affleck admitted to Variety the very Monday after it came out. ‘We tried to fix it. But it was like putting a fish’s tail on a donkey’s head.

Gigli opened to a lamentable $3.8M in August 2003. ‘I was like, it’s just spectacular, it’s a tsunami, it couldn’t be worse. This is as bad as it gets,’ Affleck recalls.

It actually did get worse: by the third weekend, the film had been dropped from a record 97 percent of the screens it opened on, and the movie lost an estimated $119m.

The shower of unkind publicity attending all this seems to have tarnished the Bennifer engagement, which was called off by January.

Affleck went on to wed Jennifer Garner and Lopez married Marc Anthony.

But, to the surprise of almost everyone, there was a sequel.

Come 2021, Bennifer were back on. Come 2022, they went through with the nuptials that Gigli may or may not have scuppered the first time.

Lopez redeemed herself with her widely praised performance in Hustlers

Bennifer: The Sequel – the pair reunited in 2021, only to announce their divorce earlier this year

By August this year, the pair had filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences

While both stars had succeeded in taking stock to reposition themselves – Affleck with a canny pivot to directing and an ultimately unhappy stint as Batman; Lopez by concentrating on her music, before Hustlers and the Super Bowl – the same cannot be said for Martin Brest, who has yet to be let out of the Hollywood sin bin even now.

Fifty-one at the time, he has vanished practically without trace, give or take a hasty name-check when Affleck’s Argo won the Best Picture Oscar.

Brest’s silence on the film’s failure has been total. Then and now, Gigli’s touchingly loyal leading man is the one forever saying he believes in the director.

In a 2022 interview, Affleck referred to Gigli as ‘a gift’, saying: ‘If the reaction to Gigli hadn’t happened, I probably wouldn’t have ultimately decided, “I don’t really have any other avenue but to direct movies,” which has turned out to be the real love of my professional life. 

‘And I did get to meet Jennifer.’

The same year, Lopez said that, of all her movies, she would most want to make a follow-up of the dismally-reviewed box office flop. 

Alas, the comeback of Bennifer proved short-lived. 

On the day they should have celebrated their second wedding anniversary, Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck, citing irreconcilable differences. This time, it didn’t even take the catastrophe of a Gigli to split them up.

Adapted from Box Office Poison © 2024 by Tim Robey, used with permission by Hanover Square Press.