Out of all the movies that people claim are the worst of all time, one that stands out is Gigli. On the surface, the film was a smart move for both of the stars, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, as they would be working with acclaimed Scent of a Woman filmmaker Martin Brest. However, the movie was disastrous, with a ridiculous plot, some offensive dialog, and a pretty silly depiction of the central relationship. Now, Affleck is looking back at the infamous film and his real-life romance that impacted it.
Affleck revealed that Gigli essentially got caught up in the tabloid fodder surrounding his relationship with Jennifer Lopez on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast. They'd met on the set of the movie, started a relationship, and were already an iconic couple before the project premiered. The actor said of the movie:
It was a function of like, we were so over — we're were so exhausted by and overexposed by this Ben Affleck Jennifer Lopez phenomenon, which itself was a function of being a tabloid story at a time when the tabloids really recognized there were they had a much wider audience than they realized. And so there was this huge proliferation of these magazines, and so it seemed as if, you know, we were shoving ourselves down everyone's throats, and we were wildly overexposed. So it was a lot of negative factors at work.
From 2001 to 2003, the two were everywhere. They were on the cover of magazines, were on red carpets, and Affleck famously starred in Lopez's "Jenny from the Block" music video. The Gone Girl star believes that this overexposure had a negative impact on Gigli. The situation was made worse when the movie in question wasn't very good and was quickly considered to be one of the worst movies ever made. Affleck said that he thinks the extreme negativity was a little outsized, explaining:
[It’s] a movie that didn’t work but not like the worst movie. In fact, [of] all the people that mocked and derided it, I think very few actually saw it
He is right that very few people actually saw it. It was made on a $75.6 million budget, and only grossed about $7.3 million. The amount of criticism they got from this situation only piled on to the negative press they were already getting from being overexposed. The movie by itself likely didn’t tank the relationship, but it certainly didn’t help the situation. Gigli came out in August 2003; by September the duo decided to postpone their wedding due to the amount of media attention, and by January 2004 they were over (at least for the time being).
Gigli may have seemed like a career ender at the time. However, the duo ended up coming out on top. Affleck used the situation as a learning experience and had a lustrous movie career after he decided to start making his own movies, starting with 2007’s Gone Baby Gone.
Lopez ended up focusing more on music and is a bestselling recording artist. The duo even gave their love another shot a few years back, and while they ended up getting divorced in January 2025, they seem to still have a lot of respect for each other. It certainly isn’t a bright spot on their careers, but Gigli may not have actually been the disaster we all thought that it was.
Those curious can revisit Gigli now by renting the film on Amazon. Ben Affleck fans can also check out his latest film Animals, which is currently streaming with a Netflix subscription.
