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

It’s a firm rule of thumb, when releasing a $75 million crime rom-com aimed at a broad international audience, to choose a title that won’t prove entirely unpronounceable to a large majority of punters.

But Gigli’s phonetics are so tricky that Ben Affleck’s Larry Gigli, a low-rent mafia enforcer, has to give him a crash course in saying his name to strangers.

“Rhymes with ‘real,’” he keeps trying, with a long-suffering tone.

So ‘Jeely’ is the most infamous bomb of its time and perhaps the reason that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, like the film in which they met, were doomed from the very beginning.

Sony Gigli let go with a sinking feeling in August 2003, but they already had reasons to be nervous. The film was subject to an excessive crescendo of bad press.

Lopez didn’t want to commit early 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 aftermath of 9/11.

There was also the money. Her salary of $12 million, just $0.5 million less than what Affleck was paid, put her near the top of Hollywood’s highest-paid actresses. Plus, she got the sweetener of a back-end deal in the high single digits, i.e. a percentage of the profits.

No one yet suspected that these would add up to much less than zero.

All eyes were on Affleck and Lopez, who were rumored to be getting close on the shoot even though Lopez had only been married for a few months to Cris Judd, a Filipino dancer she met around the time she split with Puff Daddy.

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

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

The engagement soon followed, with Affleck pulling out a much-admired 6.1-carat pink diamond ring, which earned him about a sixth of his Gigli salary.

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

First, its script: a hard-to-swallow confection, guilty of trying too hard while not creating any active, overwhelming offense.

The plot goes something like this: the calm Larry Gigli and the sultry Ricki, whom they previously didn’t know, are thrown together on a criminal assignment that ends in 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 his young brother kidnapped to use him as leverage. Played by the then 24-year-old unknown Justin Bartha, this is Brian, who has learning difficulties and lives in a care institution.

Then there’s the matter of Ricki’s sexuality. She is a lesbian, a fact left out in the trailer and marketing.

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

However, despite all the problems with the film, Lopez is warm and stunning in it.

Ricki is usually a delight. She immediately sees through Larry and maintains the upper hand, but cautiously; she fluctuates between playing with him, feeling sorry for him, and simply observing him, like an amateur psychiatrist.

They have no romantic chemistry, as the reviews complained – but this is partly on purpose, because he is crazy in love and she thinks he is a sad specimen. It’s not that they are equal.

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

The original ending was intended to be both mystical and tragic. During the final moments they filmed, Larry bled to death on the beach after a confrontation with the officer, played by Christopher Walken.

The filmmakers, alarmed at how poorly this was all being tested, conducted five weeks of reshoots and reshot much of the final cut, compressing the criminal intrigue and boosting the romance. This cost a lot more and still didn’t help.

“The movie didn’t work,” Affleck admitted to Variety the Monday after its release. “We tried to fix it. But it was like putting the tail of a fish on the head of a donkey.

Gigli opened in August 2003 for a lamentable $3.8 million. ‘I thought: it’s just spectacular, it’s a tsunami, it can’t be worse. This is as bad as it gets,” Affleck recalled.

Things got even worse: By its third weekend, the film had been removed from a record 97 percent of the screens it opened on, losing an estimated $119 million.

The barrage of unkind publicity that all this brought appears to have tarnished Bennifer’s engagement, which was called off in January.

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

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

In 2021, Bennifer was active again. In 2022, they went through with the wedding that Gigli may or may not have thwarted the first time.

While both stars had managed to take stock to reposition themselves: Affleck with a clever turn in directing and an ultimately unhappy stint as Batman; Lopez by focusing on her music, before Hustlers and the Super Bowl – the same cannot be said for Martin Brest, who even now has yet to be released from Hollywood’s sin bin.

He was fifty-one at the time and disappeared almost without a trace, with a hasty name check when Affleck’s Argo won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Brest’s silence about the film’s failure was total. Then and now, Gigli’s touchingly loyal protagonist is the one who always says he believes in the director.

In a 2022 interview, Affleck called Gigli “a gift” and said, “If the reaction to Gigli hadn’t happened, I probably wouldn’t have ultimately decided, ‘I actually have no other option but to direct movies,'” which is true love of my professional life has become apparent.

“And I met Jennifer.”

The same year, Lopez said that of all her films, she would most like to make a sequel to the dismally reviewed box office flop.

Unfortunately, Bennifer’s comeback turned out to be 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 break them up.

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