Jennifer Lopez’s $20 Million Gamble: Why the Superstar Spent Her Own Money and Defied Skeptics to Tell Her Ben Affleck Love Story

Such is the role Lopez never sought but has played on and off for decades now: J.Lo as pop villain—or, if not quite villain, a sort of hapless foil. Her famous feud with Mariah Carey in the early 2000s gave us the iconic quote from Carey after she was asked about J.Lo: “I don’t know her.” This was a rivalry born out of Carey’s divorce from her labe... See more

Jeffrey Katzenberg relied on the entertainment model of yesteryears: banking on celebrity appeal. One example is Quibi shelling out $6MM to Reese Witherspoon. Don't get me wrong. I love her as much as the next person in Legally Blonde. However, no one is rushing to hand Quibi their money as she narrates a nature documentary.

The overexposure of pop stars, to a fault, is routine. We know perhaps a bit too much about J.Lo’s pop contemporaries, too, and look: It’s not like Mariah Carey and Justin Timberlake haven’t also pushed their own post-peak vanity projects to weak receptions in recent years. But J.Lo has, for much of her career, been a curiously unsympathetic figure... See more