Ben Affleck Reflects on the 'Gigli' Backlash and Why It Still Bothers Him Today

The movie famously bombed back in 2003.

While Gigli will be most famous for being a box-office bomb, it's also the project that gave us Bennifer 1.0—it's the project where Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez famously met in 2002. The very next year, the movie was out, they were engaged, and then...they weren't. According to IndieWire, the movie had a $75 million budget and only managed to make $7 million at theaters. In a new interview with Deadline, Affleck reflected on the movie, saying that all the negativity around Gigli "doesn't sit right with him."

"Look, I’ve been in movies like Gigli, that's a famous example," he said while discussing his production company, Artists Equity, and balancing making art and raking in the big bucks. "I got a big cash payday for that. Well, it doesn't feel right in retrospect, because they lost money. It wasn't the biggest money-losing movie in history, even though it was the most famous bomb in history, perhaps."

He went on to say that it was awkward to take home a big paycheck when the movie bombed.

"Nonetheless, that doesn't sit right with me. But it also doesn't sit right with people when they go, wait a minute, we all sacrificed to be committed to this," he added.

Affleck also spoke about the film in a 2022 interview with Entertainment Weekly. He looks back on it as a learning experience and admits that in the end, it just "doesn't work."

"But really, the truth about that movie and what it taught me was how much everything around a movie sort of dictates the way people see it," Affleck said at the time. "But for being a movie that's such a famous bomb and a disaster, very few people actually saw the movie. It doesn't work, by the way. It's a sort of horse's head in a cow's body."