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

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

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.

It takes either audacious self-confidence or reckless hubris to build a completely asocial video app in 2020. You can decide which best describes Quibi, Hollywood’s $1.75 billion-funded attempt at a mobile-only Netflix of six to 10-minute micro-TV show episodes. Quibi manages to miss every trend and tactic that could help make its app popular. The ... See more

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

Right now the most valuable currency in the aspiration economy is newness, novelty and youth. Marketing and advertising, especially across fashion, is all about selling a lifestyle and image for your current self. Future chronological chapters of your life are deemed irrelevant. But these partnerships challenge that assumption. They sell the idea t... See more

Meanwhile, over the past few months, the Cut has twice gone viral with articles about age gaps. In December, it published a reported article by Lila Shapiro interviewing multiple couples with significant age gaps. In March came a personal essay by Grazie Sophia Christie about her relationship with her husband, who’s 10 years older. On social media,... See more

In movies, TV, and video games: cinematic universes. Studios have finally figured out that once audiences fall in love with fictional worlds, they want to spend lots of time in them.