#Romantic epic definition movie#

I wonder if ever a movie had been changed that much,” Brest told Variety in a rare interview published last month. “The entire context of the film was upended so profoundly, the original intention was pretty much obliterated. With that major shift and other reshoots (including changing the film’s ending, in which Gigli dies, after test audiences revolted), the budget ballooned to more than $75 million. “The studio wanted to change it into a love story, because they thought, ‘That’s what people want to see because you guys are together now.’ Which is one of the great miscalculations in the history of miscalculations.” 'Martin Brest is one of the really great directors … but it just didn’t work,” Affleck said in 2012. With the fledgling celebrity couple dominating headlines and Gigli still in production, the film’s distributors, Sony Pictures and Revolution Studios, took creative control from Brest and rewrote the film, transforming a conventional mob drama into a romantic comedy to capitalize on Bennifer mania. (Photo: Frank Trapper/Corbis via Getty Images) Lopez, the 34-year-old former In Living Color Fly Girl Lopez, had similarly broken out at the same time, with 1997’s Selena and 1998’s Out of Sight, and by 1999, she was also a bona fide pop star.īen Affleck and Jennifer Lopez arrive at the premiere of Gigli. Even though his first superhero outing, Daredevil, which arrived six months earlier in 2003, was a critical misfire, it still grossed nearly $180 million. Affleck, 30, was only six years removed from his Oscar-winning breakout in Good Will Hunting (1997), while subsequent films like Armageddon (1998) and Pearl Harbor (2001) made him a marquee star. Individually, their careers were in primo shape at the time.

Gigli was a bad film, and a box-office turkey, sure but the film endured an abnormal, arguably unfair, amount of lambasting due in large part to the A-listers’ off-screen coupling, resulting in inescapable tabloid coverage for their “Bennifer” antics. It was called Gigli, widely considered one of the worst films of the century, if not of all time. 1, 2003, the duo dropped a bomb on the world. Today, the pair remain two of Hollywood’s most prolific, celebrated and prosperous entertainers - and they successfully rekindled their high-profile romance, marrying in 2022.īut 20 years ago, on Aug. While it didn’t seem possible at the time, in the end, it all worked out for Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Illustration by Victoria Ellis for Yahoo photo: Everett Collection

Romantic epic definition