It’s a solid rule of thumb, when releasing a $75 million romantic crime comedy aimed at a broad international audience, to choose a title that won’t be completely unpronounceable to a vast majority of punters.
But Gigli’s phonetics are so problematic that Larry Gigli (Ben Affleck), a low-level mobster, must give a crash course in how to say his name to strangers.
“It rhymes with ‘really,'” he continues trying, with a patient air.
So, ‘Jeely,’ the most notorious bomb of its time and the reason, perhaps, why Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, like the movie in which they met, were doomed from the start.
sony He let go of Gigli with a sinking feeling. in August 2003, but they already had reason to be nervous. The film had been subject to a lavish crescendo of bad press.
Gigli was the most notorious bomb of its time, with an estimated loss of $119 million.
Lopez was non-committal from the start when she was courted to play Ricki, a lesbian gangster, and was nearly replaced by Halle Berry, who will always be grateful that scheduling conflicts on X2 gave her the option to opt out.
Lopez was lured back after a planned thriller called Tick Tock, about terrorist attacks, was canceled in the wake of 9/11.
There was also the money. Her $12 million salary, just $0.5 million less than what Affleck received, propelled her near the top end of Hollywood’s highest-paid actresses. Additionally, they gave him the incentive of a high single-digit final settlement, meaning a percentage of the profits.
No one yet suspected that these totals were going to be much less than zero.
All eyes were on Affleck and Lopez, who were rumored to be close to filming, even though Lopez had been married for just a few months to Cris Judd, a Filipino dancer she had met at the time of her breakup with Puff. Daddy.
When filming wrapped in April 2002, Affleck took out a full-page commercial congratulating Lopez as his co-star. Then they all hugged each other at a surprise party for her 32nd birthday in July, just two days before she filed for divorce from Judd.
Larry Gigli and sexy Ricki team up on a crime mission that turns into something like Get Shorty meets Rain Man.
All eyes were on Affleck and Lopez, who were rumored to be close to filming.
A summer of love followed, as evidenced in Jenny from the Block’s video.
A summer of love followed, as evidenced in the Jenny from the Block video, which premiered on MTV in November 2002. While sunbathing on a luxury yacht, Affleck caresses Lopez, kisses her butt and undo a bikini string.
The engagement quickly followed, with Affleck pulling out a 6.1-carat pink diamond ring that cost him about a sixth of his Gigli salary.
The overexposure of its stars became the film’s worst enemy. But the true architect of this hitherto anonymous catastrophe was the man who wrote, directed and produced it: Martin Brest.
First, his script: a hard candy to swallow, guilty of trying too hard when not causing active, awesome offense.
The plot goes something like this: inexperienced Larry Gigli and sultry Ricki, who previously didn’t know each other, get together on a criminal mission 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 to kidnap the latter’s younger brother to use as leverage. Played by then-unknown 24-year-old Justin Bartha, this is Brian, who has learning difficulties and lives in a care home.
Then there’s the question of Ricki’s sexuality. She is a lesbian, a fact that is omitted from the trailer and marketing.
Ricky is a lesbian, a fact that is omitted from 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
The engagement quickly followed, with Affleck pulling out a 6.1-carat pink diamond ring that cost him about a sixth of his Gigli salary.
But before we know it, Larry has managed to seduce her.
Yet for all the film’s problems, Lopez is warm and dazzling.
Ricki, most of the way, is a delight. She sees through Larry immediately and maintains the upper hand, but gently; she oscillates between playing with him, pitying him, and simply observing him, like an amateur psychiatrist.
They don’t have romantic chemistry, as critics complained, but this is partly on purpose, because he is stupidly in love and she finds him a sad specimen. It’s not that they are the same.
Gigli simply shouldn’t have been a romantic comedy.
The original ending was intended to be both mystical and tragic. The final moments, which they filmed, showed Larry bleeding to death on the beach, after a confrontation with the police officer played by Christopher Walken.
The filmmakers, alarmed by how bad this all turned out, reshot for five weeks and cut out much of the last section, compressing the criminal intrigue while pushing the romance. This cost a lot more and still didn’t help.
“The movie didn’t work,” Affleck admitted to Variety the same Monday after its release. ‘We tried to fix it. But it was like putting a fish tail on a donkey’s head.
Gigli opened with a pitiful $3.8 million in August 2003. “I thought, it’s just spectacular, it’s a tsunami, it couldn’t be worse.” “This is as bad as it gets,” Affleck recalls.
In fact, it got worse: By its third weekend, the film had been pulled from a record 97 percent of the screens on which it was released, and the film lost an estimated $119 million.
The barrage of unpleasant publicity that accompanies all of this appears to have clouded Bennifer’s engagement, which was called off in January.
Affleck married Jennifer Garner and Lopez married Marc Anthony.
But, to the surprise of almost everyone, there was a sequel.
In 2021, Bennifer appeared again. In 2022, they continued with the nuptials that Gigli may or may not have ruined the first time.
López redeemed himself with his praised performance in Hustlers
Bennifer: The Sequel: The couple reunited in 2021, only to announce their divorce earlier this year.
In August this year, the couple had filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.
Although both stars had managed to take stock to reposition themselves: Affleck with a shrewd turn towards directing and an ultimately unhappy period as Batman; Lopez concentrating on his music, before Hustlers and the Super Bowl; The same cannot be said for Martin Brest, who has yet to be let out of Hollywood’s sin bin.
Fifty-one years old at the time, he disappeared virtually without a trace, give or take a quick name check when Affleck’s Argo won the Oscar for Best Picture.
Brest’s silence on the film’s failure has been 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 referred to Gigli as “a gift” and said, “If the backlash toward Gigli hadn’t happened, I probably wouldn’t have ultimately decided, ‘I really have no other avenue but to direct movies.'” who has turned out to be the true love of my professional life.
“And I got to meet Jennifer.”
The same year, López said that, of all his films, the one he would most like would be to make a sequel to the box office failure that had bad reviews.
Unfortunately, Bennifer’s return was 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 separate them.
Adapted from Box Office Poison © 2024 by Tim Robey, used with permission of Hanover Square Press.