When Gigli failed at the box office, “I was eviscerated,” Lopez said in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2017. “I lost my sense of self, questioned i
When Gigli failed at the box office, “I was eviscerated,” Lopez said in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2017. “I lost my sense of self, questioned if I belonged in this business, thought maybe I did suck at everything.” Plus, Lopez added, “My relationship self-destructed in front of the entire world. It was a two-year thing for me until I picked myself up again.”
Lopez didn’t abandon the genre entirely, but she never found an onscreen counterpart who truly matched her particular skill for romantic comedies—the Tom Hanks to her Meg Ryan, the Richard Gere to her Julia Roberts. She did, however, teach Gere’s listless suburban husband to rekindle his passion with Susan Sarandon in Shall We Dance? (2004). The following year’s Monster-in-Law focused on Lopez and her character’s future mother-in-law, played by Jane Fonda, rather than Michael Vartan, who played her groom.
Alex O’Loughlin and Jennifer Lopez film The Backup Plan on July 22, 2009 in New York City’s Central Park.Ray Tamarra/Getty Images
“Putting Jennifer Lopez in your romantic comedy automatically gets you halfway to a decent movie. The male lead hardly matters,” The New York Times wrote in its review of the largely forgettable Shotgun Wedding (2022). Josh Duhamel, Lopez’s love interest, is “not exactly Clark Gable, but Lopez makes it work. She always does,” the review adds. “Much of the dialogue feels canned and phony in the style of a badly written sitcom. But coming out of J. Lo’s mouth, I believed it.”
Around the mid-aughts, Lopez formed Nuyorican Productions, Inc. with longtime manager Benny Medina. Their first project was another rom-com, Second Act (2018), in which Lopez plays an assistant manager at a Queens big-box store opposite real-life pal Leah Remini as her onscreen best friend.
She followed it up with ultra-meta rom-com Marry Me, starring Lopez as a pop star set to wed her renowned fiancé (played by Colombian singer Maluma) in a splashy Madison Square Garden wedding. When she’s left at the altar, Lopez’s character plucks a math teacher out of the audience, played by Owen Wilson, and marries him instead. In real life, Lopez was engaged to former New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez. Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2020 before the film’s release, Lopez admitted that publicly dating Marc Anthony and divorcing him in 2014 following the Bennifer bedlam had left scars. “You’re out there on your own making mistakes, and I made plenty over the years,” she said. “I’ve watched my personal life crash and burn many times, and then have to live with that. People don’t understand how much it hurts to go through these things and to fail in front of the world.”
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