The story of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, glamorous movie stars whose love affair blossomed on a Hollywood set, has turned into the summer's most watched romance. The movie they made, however, has had no such luck.
"Gigli," which opened on Friday, brought in $3.8 million over the weekend, according to studio estimates. It just made the list of the 10 highest-grossing films — it was 8th — but analysts said that recovering the $54 million it cost to make "Gigli" is highly unlikely.
"Any major studio picture that debuts at that amount is a disappointment." said Brandon Gray, president of the box-office tracking firm Box Office Mojo, which runs the Web site www.boxofficemojo.com. The box office results were "really quite terrible, actually," he said.
Steve Elzer, a spokesman for the film's distributor, Columbia Pictures, was circumspect yesterday. "We gave it our all and it didn't work," he said. "The filmmakers, the stars and the studio did everything we could to support the film."
Hardly anyone had anything good to say about "Gigli," and audience members not only listened to the critics, they also told their friends not to go see it.
"There was a lot of bad word-of-mouth from the opening day," said Gitesh Pandya, editor of BoxOfficeGuru.com, which tracks box office news and data. From Friday to Saturday night, he said, audiences fell by 11 percent. "Based on the $3.8 million opening and the bad word-of-mouth, I'm projecting this one to gross $10 million in the domestic market."
The problems with "Gigli" (pronounced JEE-lee, although not by many) did not start with the reviews, but the reviews were scathing. The Washington Post called the movie "enervated, torpid, slack, dreary and, oh yes, nasty, brutish and long."
The Los Angeles Times told readers, "Forget the hype — this movie would stink even without its big-ticket stars."
The New York Times said the movie, though it draws on various other movies, "has a special badness all its own."
The Wall Street Journal called it "the worst movie — all right, the worst allegedly major movie — of our admittedly young century."
Worse news for the film, though, may lie in the views of the relatively few who went to see it. Leith Mahkewa, visiting New York from outside Montreal, was blunt in her assessment on leaving a theater in Times Square. "Even though I fell asleep, I didn't miss anything," she said. "I'll tell friends."
The bad publicity surrounding "Gigli" predates the film's opening, Mr. Gray said. "Sometimes, people root for certain movies to fail and this seems to have been one of them," he said.
Much of the problem was overexposure, Mr. Pandya said. Ms. Lopez and Mr. Affleck have appeared on too many magazine covers and television programs, and so there may have been little reason for moviegoers to shell out their money to see what they could watch free on television, he said.
"I don't think it's the worst flop ever," Mr. Pandya added. "Pluto Nash," an Eddie Murphy film that opened last year to near-universal derision, cost more to make than "Gigli" and did not do well at all, he said.
The "Gigli" genre — not quite a mob movie, not quite a comedy, not quite a pure romance — is difficult, Mr. Gray said. " `Gigli' is usually the kind of movie that gets barely released and then goes straight to video or gets used as filler on HBO," he said. "It's just not an appealing genre for mass audiences."
That "Gigli" made as much money as it did in the face of such bad reviews is testament to how well it was marketed, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the Exhibitor Relations Company in Los Angeles. "There was a predisposition by a lot of people to slam this movie even before they saw it," he said.
Analysts said they did not think that the movie's poor showing would have much of an effect on the careers of either Mr. Affleck or Ms. Lopez, both of whom have several other movies in the works. One is "Jersey Girl," in which they are again co-stars; the release date has been pushed back, perhaps to distance the film from "Gigli," some analysts said.
But both actors are coming off other solid box office performances. Ms. Lopez's late 2002 film "Maid in Manhattan" has taken in nearly $94 million domestically, the best showing of any of her movies, and Mr. Affleck did well enough as a leading man in both "Sum of All Fears" and "Daredevil," which made more than $100 million each, Mr. Gray said.
The effect on Martin Brest, the writer and director is less clear, though. Another film he directed, "Meet Joe Black" in 1998, was not viewed as a success, according to Mr. Gray.
"But the industry's interesting, how forgiving it can be," he said. "It's usually three strikes and you're out, so he'll probably get to make another movie."