Jennifer Lopez has been in and out of the headlines in the last year or so, and for all the wrong reasons. Last year was meant to kick off a comeback for the celeb, complete with a new album, a new movie, and a major world tour. Soon, though, everything went belly up, and Lopez’s comeback hopes went with them.
That leaves an obvious question: where did everything go wrong? That is, what caused one of the world’s biggest celebs to suddenly fall from fame, right when she was about to get back on top? If you really want the answers, keep reading to discover every juicy little detail!
Her comeback album was a flop
One of the reasons that Jennifer Lopez is so famous is that she is two kinds of celebrity rolled into one. Thanks to her skill, grace, and beauty, she became one of the most recognizable movie stars in the world. Before that, though, she was a musician, and she built her fortune around her skills as a singer. And in 2024, she launched This Is Me…Now, whose title references her 2002 album This Is Me…Then.
The title of the new album is a fun callback to the old one, and in a fun bit of symmetry, each album focuses on her relationship with Ben Affleck. Thanks to Lopez’s star power and the spicy subject matter, it certainly seemed like the new album would be a hit. Sadly, it wasn’t: the album had one negative review after another. Even worse, it landed on the Billboard 200 chart at 38, meaning that J-Lo’s first album in over a decade barely made a ripple.
A feature film failure
For whatever reason, Jennifer Lopez went all in on this comeback attempt. Remember when we said she was both a celebrity singer and a movie star? Well, Lopez decided to put both skills to use and release a new movie to coincide with the album. The film, a musical titled This Is Me…Now: A Love Story, is loosely based on Lopez’s own romantic misadventures when she was younger. Unfortunately, that little bit of verisimilitude wasn’t enough to keep the film from flopping.
The This Is Me…Now movie received negative reviews from critics and audiences alike. Many felt the movie was nothing more than an obnoxious vanity project for Lopez. There may be some truth to that, as the movie’s original financiers ditched the film. While she didn’t have to do so, Lopez personally bankrolled an estimated $20 million to bring this film to life. Considering that the film was a total flop, this money was completely wasted, making this film the most expensive failure when it comes to J-Lo’s comeback attempt.
A failed documentary
If you thought that Jennifer Lopez’s comeback was limited to a failed album and a failed movie, you’d better think again! She eventually released a documentary that was meant to highlight all of the work that went into those previous projects. Ideally, the documentary would have been a kind of advertisement for the movie and film and helped new fans find them. Unfortunately, the documentary just ended up making everything look more embarrassing for Lopez.
That’s because it didn’t take very long for social media users to find the most cringeworthy clips in this documentary and share them to platforms like TikTok and X. These clips include Lopez waxing philosophic about being a young gym rat back in Brooklyn; it’s meant to be endearing, but it’s hard to take someone discussing their humble roots very seriously when they just have a spare $20 million sitting around to finance ambitions vanity projects.
Still, that paled in comparison to a clip of Lopez’s staff reading out the names of everyone, including Taylor Swift, who refused to star in the This Is Me…Now movie. Presumably, this was meant to highlight J-Lo’s struggles making the movie, but the clip just served as proof that many A-listers simply wanted nothing to do with the project.
A canceled tour, divorce, and dark allegations now haunt Jennifer Lopez
After that, things spiraled pretty quickly for Jennifer Lopez. She ended up canceling her world tour, citing the need to spend more time with her family. However, fans couldn’t help but notice that her ticket sales had been really low. That might have been reason enough to cancel, but many of J-Lo’s fans thought the cancellation was actually the musician’s way of covering up her marriage falling apart.
That speculation proved correct when Lopez and Affleck announced their divorce in August of 2024. This led to even more conspiracies that the two got divorced because of J-Lo’s previous involvement with Sean “Diddy” Combs. That was never proven, but after Diddy’s arrest, J-Lo’s past with him came back to bite her. And just like that, a would-be comeback ended in a year of one major failure after another!