When Jennifer Lopez began 2024, she had many reasons to think it would be her biggest and most beautiful year yet, personally and professionally.
The 55-year-old singer/actor/dancer/influencer/entrepreneur wasn’t just one of the most famous women in the world, she was back together with the love of her life, Ben Affleck, rekindling their legendary romance after they dramatically called off their engagement 20 years earlier.
Lopez also was excited to release her first album in 10 years, “This Is Me … Now,” launch a North American concert tour and release two films, one a documentary that valorized her album, her tour, her great love with Affleck and her supposed accomplishments in self-discovery.
But by the summer, Lopez already was being branded one of the entertainment industry’s biggest “losers” of 2024, first because people didn’t rush to buy her album, according to Hollywood experts Matthew Belloni and Lucas Shaw on Belloni’s “The Town” podcast.
Soon, Lopez also canceled her tour and was in the throes of one of the biggest celebrity meltdowns of the year — her divorce from Affleck after barely two years of marriage.
Lopez’s year didn’t get much better, personally or professionally, or in terms of her public relations, according to Belloni on his Monday’s “The Town” episode. On the episode, Belloni, a co-founder of Puck and the former editor in chief at the Hollywood Reporter, said that Lopez was his “runner up” for biggest P.R. “fails” of 2024.
Guest Lucas Shaw, who covers the entertainment industry for Bloomberg News, agreed that Lopez’s year was pretty disastrous and recommended that she stop trying to be so ubiquitous on social media and elsewhere.
“She needs to go away,” Shaw said, as if to suggest that Lopez would be well served by retreating for a bit from the public eye in order to do some professional recalibration, while building fans’ excitement about her eventual return.
For Belloni, his “winner” for biggest P.R. fail of 2024 went to the publicists involved with the release of the film “It Ends With Us,” which he called an absolute “nuclear bomb of a P.R. nightmare.” Belloni said publicists on both sides of the explosive Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni feud over alleged sexual harassment and “smear campaigns” somehow managed to tarnish a movie that was “an unheralded box office smash” and was supposed to resuscitate Lively’s career and establish Baldoni as a reputable director.
But to Belloni, Lopez’s public relations year was bad enough that it’s come in second place in his show’s unofficial “Townie” awards. Perhaps Lopez’s one bright spot in the year could be that she co-hosted the annual Met Gala in May. But her solo appearance at the star-packed fashion event was still overshadowed by growing speculation that her marriage to Affleck was in trouble.
Lopez’s 2024 movie output also failed to meet expectations, after several years of successful starring roles in “Hustlers” and in genre action and romantic comedies for Netflix and Amazon.
Lopez’s Netflix sci-fi film “Atlas” was panned by critics. Meanwhile, her inspirational sports drama, “Unstoppable,” in which she plays the mother of wrestler Anthony Robles, has failed to generate Oscar buzz, as expected, according to Belloni. “Unstoppable” also was produced by Lopez’s soon-to-be ex-husband. At some point, some Oscar watchers wondered if Lopez could finally nab her long-coveted Academy Award nomination. Apparently, with that kind of thinking, Lopez has heavily promoted the film at the Toronto Film Festival and at other events, as well on social media.
But Belloni said that Oscar glory for Lopez is “not happening.”
“OK, someone is telling Jennifer Lopez that this movie ‘Unstoppable’ is an Oscar movie,” Belloni said. “It is not. It is not getting nominated for anything. She keeps going to these big award season style events to promote the movie.” That’s when Shaw concurred, “She needs to go away.”
Over the past several months, Lopez has used her flair for theatrics to try and spin even her troubled personal life into content that will garner attention on social media and in gossip publications. For example, she broadcast news about the multi-day, “Bridgerton”-themed celebration of her 55th birthday in the Hamptons and treated fans to a series of “thirst trap” photos of her in her swimsuit.
When Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck, she chose to do it on the second anniversary of their lavish Georgia wedding, clearly in a bid for attention while she reportedly also wanted to “sting” her estranged husband for pushing for the breakup.
Four months later, Affleck spent the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with his ex-wife Jennifer Garner and their three children, according to Page Six and other outlets.
Meanwhile, Lopez hung out in snowy Aspen over the holidays, as she shared on social media. She made news by being spotted hanging out last Friday with Kevin Costner in a private lounge above Aspen’s famous Western clothing and hat store, Kemo Sabe, Page Six reported.
But Lopez reportedly wasn’t included in the star-studded party thrown the next night by billionaire Jeff Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sanchez at a nearby sushi restaurant, as Page Six also reported.
Other high-flyers made Bezos’ guest list, including Costner, as well as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Page Six reported. Of course, it probably wouldn’t be a good look for Lopez to be seen in the company of Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, given that she’s long been critical of the incoming president. One of her personal and professional highlights was singing “This Land Is Your Land” and “America the Beautiful” at the 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden.
