jennifer lopez journey

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J.lo can't stop telling us about herself. why can't i stop watching.

Brittany Luse

Jennifer Lopez's latest film is a direct-to-streaming musical extravaganza called This Is Me...Now: A Love Story. Prime hide caption

Jennifer Lopez's latest film is a direct-to-streaming musical extravaganza called This Is Me...Now: A Love Story.

I had barely cycled through my Usher-Beyoncé-Taylor induced pop culture hangover from the Super Bowl when it was time to receive the latest offering from yet another omnipresent star, Jennifer Lopez. Her newest film, This Is Me... Now: A Love Story, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is a movie musical/visual album starring and co-written by Lopez herself and directed by music video veteran Dave Meyers. It's a sparkling temple to the self, disguised as a romantic odyssey — and quintessentially Lopez.

The 65-minute film follows the tortured love life of a somewhat fictional version of Lopez, a character I'll hereafter refer to as J.Lo. Like the real Lopez, J.Lo is gorgeous, wealthy and has a reputation as a hopeless romantic on the hunt for her one true love. It's autofiction in the vein of Richard Pryor's Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling , but with the silliness of Mariah Carey's Glitter and the subtlety of the music video for Kanye West's "Bound 2". Days after watching This Is Me...Now , I'm still not sure whether or not it was good, or if a one word summation is even a fair way to assess the hour-long ( and self-financed ) $20 million art therapy session Lopez has produced.

Jennifer Lopez: Then and now

Like many of her most beloved movies, This Is Me...Now is campy, nonsensical, and easy to watch. Still, for every rote monologue from J.Lo about the virtues of forever love, a few rays of Lopez's genuine charisma and onscreen chops shine through reassuringly.

We see J.Lo trace her romantic troubles back to the 1970s Bronx of her girlhood, unpack them in therapy sessions with a practitioner played by rapper Fat Joe, and augment them through a tongue-in-cheek carousel of splashy weddings and couples counseling sessions with various unnamed husbands. Weddings are a perennial theme for Lopez, who has married four times and played a bride on at least twice as many occasions for a film. It's a phenomenon I detangled with critic Rachel Handler in an episode of my show It's Been A Minute from last year.

It's Been a Minute

Breaking down the jennifer lopez wedding industrial complex canon.

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In this latest portrayal, judging J.Lo's relationship foibles from heaven above are members of her own personal Zodiac council, played by Jane Fonda, Post Malone, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Keke Palmer, among others. In between sparse bits of dialogue, J.Lo coos and sashays along to serviceable R&B-tinged songs from her first new album in a decade, aptly titled This Is Me... Now .

One standout sequence depicts Lopez overcoming an abusive relationship. This trauma is represented in literal, harrowing detail, but also artistically, through percussive modern dance moves that recall the push-pull of a toxic relationship dynamic. Here and throughout This Is Me...Now Lopez's dancing is career-best, her staggering athleticism punctuated by evocative choreography and imaginative staging. Lopez is showing all her hard work, and begging us to take it seriously, even as her character lays charmingly about on a J.Lo-monogrammed custom sofa, nursing a broken heart with a Barbra Streisand movie.

Jennifer Lopez performs during the Super Bowl halftime show in February 2020. Tom Pennington/Getty Images hide caption

Jennifer Lopez performs during the Super Bowl halftime show in February 2020.

Seeking validation, by Lopez's account, has been a long-running theme in her life and public works. In her 2014 memoir True Love , Lopez details how she used her relationships to mask low self-esteem. Lopez's need to be taken seriously is also expressed within the first minute of her 2022 Netflix documentary, Halftime , a film in which we see her headline the Super Bowl halftime show, win deserved praise for her role in Hustlers , and perform at President Biden's inauguration . Lopez's lengthy and trailblazing career as a Latina in Hollywood is a wonder in and of itself. And though the legitimacy of her singing career has taken a few hits over the years, she has wrung nearly a quarter-century of superstardom out of what is arguably her third best talent, even after dancing and then acting had already made her a household name.

But it's her naked desire for adulation, as opposed to unbridled artistic expression, that undercuts Lopez's film, and echoes our current celebrity oversaturation. Lopez herself is a marvel of allure and moxie. Her lovesickness, steady ambition, and irrepressible theater kid energy don't repel the public, they delight us. When This Is Me...Now leans into that sensibility, it soars. And when Lopez talks, I'm listening. But when pressed, Lopez, similar to many of her A-list peers these days, seems unable to tell us much beyond platitudes about self-love and upcoming tour dates.

Lopez recently told NPR's Morning Edition host Leila Fadel that This Is Me...Now is her most personal project yet, a tall order for someone who's been a tabloid fixture for over 25 years. But despite Lopez and her personal life being the only subject the film covers, This Is Me...Now doesn't actually shed any more light on her emotional journey than True Love or Halftime did. Unlike Beyoncé's acclaimed 2016 visual album Lemonade , This Is Me...Now drops no apparent bombshells or clear enough Easter eggs to spark flames of social media speculation. The film instead hits all the expected beats — hot, successful woman looks for self-assurance through romance, breakups ensue — while speeding past its more revealing moments without reflection.

Movie Interviews

How jennifer lopez fought for her 'second act'.

In This Is Me...Now , J.Lo exists purely to love and be loved in the most general sense; first by a partner, then by herself, and finally, most importantly, by us.

Perhaps we'll get some deeper insight from Lopez's upcoming documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told , a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this visual album. The trailer teases fat tears, juicy confessionals, and tense rehearsal footage , but it's unclear what Lopez will reveal until the film hits Prime Video on February 27. Once again I'll be watching, amusedly and shamefully. When it comes to the confessional temple of J.Lo, I'm not disciplined enough to look away.

Jennifer Lopez in This Is Me...Now: A Love Story. Prime hide caption

• Jennifer Lopez

The enduring power of J.Lo: How Jennifer Lopez marks our lives then … and now

Jennifer Lopez knows how to grab our attention.

Her latest project, an album and accompanying musical film titled “This is Me… Now," has been both praised and criticized, with many in between trying to understand what Lopez’s latest artistic endeavor even means.

Yet the myriad reactions dissecting the project all point to one key fact. Like it or not, we're talking about J.Lo.

“She’s an anomaly,” culture critic Jack Rico told NBC News. "Today, I don’t think it’s possible to fully comprehend and grasp how special Jennifer Lopez is. ... She should be a case study, the same way we have college classes for Bad Bunny or Taylor Swift .”

In a way, the Lopez enigma is at the center of her enduring power as someone who marked a generation of millennials — especially Latino millennials like me.

Lopez has “cracked all of the walls and barriers” society placed on her and more broadly places on Latinos, on women and on people over 50, Rico said. “She’s a defiance.”

People my age don’t remember a time when Lopez wasn’t a big deal — setting trends with her music and dance moves, her acting performances and her fashion choices.

Lopez has worked consistently through the years — she has starred in over 35 movies, released nine studio albums, produced and appeared in countless TV shows, published a memoir, completed a residency in Las Vegas and a world tour.

She also became a fashion icon following her red carpet appearance in 2000 wearing a show-stopping green Versace dress that inspired the creation of Google images .

And those not familiar with her trajectory probably know of Lopez from her highly publicized string of romances and marriages.

So what has she done lately? She spent $20 million of her own money in a multimedia project that leans into her love life, her way.

In “This Is Me... Now,” Lopez takes her sometimes questionable and even eye-rolling relationships and shines on them a spotlight few artists at her level would dare to do, focusing mainly on her rekindled romance with now-husband actor Ben Affleck. The result? She got our attention — and got a lot of critics and fans talking about it.

Taking her string of romances — and owning it

Lopez has said her latest project is her " most honest " one yet, though fans and detractors say she held back on the subject of relationships and her tumultuous path to self-love.

The album sounds like a musical time capsule encompassing her 25-year music career and her lifelong search for her voice and artistic identity.

The film is not quite conceptual nor completely abstract, but something in between, mixing lighthearted and introspective moments to take us on her journey to ... yes, love.

In my view, what “This Is Me... Now” does effectively is showcase Lopez’s confidence as a triple-threat performer: singer, dancer and actor.

While her latest work reminded people like me of her unmatched talent, some say it was a missed opportunity for the 54-year-old to open up at a more personal level, distancing herself from her performer persona and showing off a more vulnerable, different side. 

“The thing about Jennifer, and I think this is where a lot of the criticism is coming from, is that she has not been able to evolve,” Rico said. “You can’t get bigger than what she has done, and I think there’s a part of her that is like, ‘How do I top myself?’”

Yet the recent debate proves that Lopez remains relevant — and is still shifting and influencing American pop culture.

My life's soundtrack

Because “This Is Me... Now” serves as a bookend to her 2002 studio album “This Is Me… Then” — inspired by Lopez’s first engagement to Affleck and eventual breakup — it’s making many of us revisit our own memories of growing up with Lopez.

I can't tell you exactly when I first heard Lopez’s 1999 debut single, “If You Had My Love.” I just know I've always known it. The song catapulted Lopez’s music career following her breakout performance as the slain “Queen of Tejano Music” Selena Quintanilla in the 1997 film “Selena,” which turned her into a Hollywood movie star and helped cement Selena's musical legacy to a younger generation like me.

Lopez then established herself as a mega pop star with iconic music videos and hits like “Let’s Get Loud” and “Waiting for Tonight" from her debut album “On The 6.”

The first album I ever owned was the Backstreet Boys’ 1999 album “Millenium” — who didn't succumb to the boy band craze of the 1990s? But the one I cherished most was Lopez’s 2001 album “J.Lo.”

At 7, I used crayons to label my "J.Lo" album with my name in case I lost it while taking it everywhere in my portable CD player. I couldn't understand much of the lyrics because I only spoke Spanish, but I remember imitating Lopez while dancing to her pop tracks combined with Y2K era electronic sounds, R&B, hip-hop and Latin music influences.

The “J.Lo” album debuted at No. 1. That same week, Lopez starred in the romantic comedy “The Wedding Planner” — which topped the box office.

“When she has the No. 1 record, and the No. 1 movie at the exact same time for all general audiences, it’s nothing short of a miracle,” Rico said. In fact, the milestone made Lopez the first woman to simultaneously have a top film and album on opening week.

As a kid who loved performing and once aspired to be a dancer, seeing a fellow Puerto Rican succeed at this epic scale gave me confidence in my own identity from a very young age.

An icon from the Latin music 'explosion'

Lopez achieved superstar status alongside a few other artists of Hispanic descent who reached global success during the Latin music explosion of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

If there was a Mount Rushmore for the Latin explosion , the faces of Lopez, Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony and Shakira would be carved in it — and maybe Christina Aguilera, who is Ecuadorian American, and Enrique Iglesias, a Hispanic from Spain, if we had more space.

Growing up at this time, I thought it was always this way. But as an adult, I realized it was mostly a specific period in pop culture.

Decades later, Lopez and Shakira reignited this history during their record-breaking 2020 Super Bowl Halftime performance , featuring Bad Bunny and J Balvin , two big faces of the new Latin music boom dominated by reggaeton music.

"The Super Bowl was a very revealing Jennifer Lopez moment," Leila Cobo, Billboard’s chief content officer of Latin, told the Pop Pantheon podcast on August 2023. "It showed why she still matters.”

Lopez, a U.S.-born Latina, is inherently bicultural. Her innate code-switching abilities has helped her become a naturally shapeshifting entertainer, a unique quality that's kept her in the pop culture zeitgeist for nearly three decades.

“She can be 40. She can be 50. She can be 85. And she still can pull that off," Cobo said. "Not very many people can do that ... This is not simply someone who’s here for celebrity. I think she wants to transcend that."

J.Lo's — and my — full-circle moment

I no longer buy J.Lo CDs and mark them with a crayon. But listening to "This Is Me... Now" made me think about my own path to self-acceptance and yes, finding love along the way.

I still tease my mother for not taking me to Lopez’s 2001 concert in Puerto Rico , where I lived as a child, because I was too young. She promised she would take me the next time Lopez had a concert in my homeland, but that was the only show Lopez ever did there. For years, my consolation prize was endlessly rewatching the DVD version of the 2001 concert I got as a Three Kings Day gift.

But I got a second chance.

I was recently listening to the new album, where songs like “Can’t Get Enough” let me bask in the joy of being a newlywed, and where “Rebound” and “Broken Like Me” make me reflect on how far I’ve come, and I told my husband about how I still dreamed of seeing Lopez in concert.

He then surprised me with tickets to one of Lopez's shows in New York City, where I now live, to celebrate my 30th birthday this summer.

You could say the full-circle moment shows how Lopez marked my life then … and now.

That's a pretty remarkable journey for Jenny from the Block.

For more from NBC Latino,  sign up for our weekly newsletter .

Nicole Acevedo is a reporter for NBC News Digital. She reports, writes and produces stories for NBC Latino and NBCNews.com.

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Photo: Norman Jean Roy

Inside Jennifer Lopez's 'This Is Me... Now': The Superstar & Her Team Detail Why The New Album Is Unlike Anything She's Done Before

Ten years after Jennifer Lopez’s last album – and more than 20 after it's prequel — 'This Is Me... Now,' has finally arrived. Lopez and her team discuss the inspiration behind her deeply personal return to music.

Since the 1999 launch of her unstoppable music career, Jennifer Lopez has released eight studio albums and over 60 singles that have racked up billions of streams worldwide. So it's hard to believe there's been a full decade between the multihyphenate's last album, 2014's A.K.A., and her ninth studio LP, This Is Me… Now .

Released on Feb. 16 and described as "an intimate, fantastical and narrative-driven reflection of Lopez's journey to find love," This Is Me… Now is the highly anticipated sequel to Lopez's now-iconic This Is Me… Then . The 2002 project spawned megahits "Jenny From the Block" and "All I Have," but it's the hidden gems like "The One," "Again" and "I've Been Thinkin'" that perfectly capture a special moment in time for Lopez, whose then-budding romance with Oscar-winning actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck was beginning to take the world by storm.

Though their widely beloved (and broadcasted) romance fizzled in the early 2000s, "Bennifer" is back together two decades later — and in classic J.Lo fashion, love is inspiring her more than anything else. The 20-year span between losing each other and reconnecting is chronicled in This Is Me… Now , Lopez's self-proclaimed magnum opus.

"In a strange magical twist of fate, I wound up back together with Ben, and it inspired me again to go back in the studio in the same way I did with This Is Me… Then ," Lopez tells GRAMMY.com. "I believe true love exists, I believe that some things are forever.

"If you've ever wondered about that, I'm sharing that with you: Don't give up," she continues. "That was a worthy message to put out into the world because I know I needed that a lot in my life. I wasn't sure and it led me down some very questionable roads. What I think a lot of people do is look for love outside themselves instead of inward, so that more than anything was the inspiration for the new album."

The 13-track LP is accompanied by a musical film, This Is Me…Now: A Love Story , which is available on Prime Video now. Self-funded by Lopez and directed by Dave Myers , the film drives home Lopez's journey of self-love, discovery and awareness while finding her happily ever after.

Lopez, along with BMG's A&R Brandon Riester and the album's executive producer Rogét Chahayed , reflected about her career-defining LP and how it all came together.

From the start, Lopez was relentless about making the album sound incredible, even converting part of her Los Angeles home into a studio and shutting down everything — including stepping back from making movies in order to maintain focus on the recording sessions for This Is Me… Now . She also shared private love letters from Affleck with the songwriters and producers to convey the narrative she wanted to translate into the music. 

"She said to me, 'Let's make an album that I'm excited about because I'm in love and that's when I make my best music,'" Riester says. "Jennifer is very much an integral part of the vision and the production and the songwriting on this album. This is her story."

Lopez recruited Chahayed after hearing Jack Harlow 's GRAMMY-nominated No. 1 hit "First Class," which he co-produced in 2022. Their initial conversations about musical influences led to Lopez giving Chahayed the rundown of her and Affleck's history together, along with the concept for the album itself.

"She actually wanted to start making music the next day," Chahayed recalls. "But I definitely needed a few days to process everything because I had been manifesting for a while to be able to work with an artist that has a legacy and decades of success, and my prayers were answered."

This Is Me… Now sees Lopez fully leaning into being a hopeless romantic — something she's been heavily scrutinized over for decades. In the extravagant film of the same name, she makes light of her three failed marriages, but it's with the intention of inspiring others that true love exists, which has always been at the core of Lopez's music.

"We're living in a society where the value of relationships and marriage has been sort of lost," Chahayed suggests. "Her album will not only give people a new perspective on her music in general, but also give them a chance to believe in love again — and feel like there's someone out there for you, even if it's someone that you broke up with 10, 20 years ago."

This Is Me… Now picks up right where 2002's twice platinum-selling This Is Me… Then left off with some obvious nods to the prequel; the most blatant is "Dear Ben Pt. II," a follow up to "Dear Ben," on which Lopez describes Affleck as "my lust, my love, my man, my child, my friend, and my king." Still, the 54-year-old global icon didn't want to get caught up in trying to chase hits or recreate the past.

"We never listened to This Is Me... Then in the studio, not one time. That record is always going to have such a special place in my heart, but the sequel is just like another level," Lopez says. "People who have been on this journey with me and who have seen me fall down and get back up and make mistakes and get divorced — that journey got me to a place where I can now go, 'I've figured some things out about myself.'"

As much as the 13-track LP seizes the fairytale-like rekindling of Lopez and Affleck's relationship, it's also about something much bigger: how self-love, or lack thereof, plays a role in the relationships we have with others. "Hearts and Flowers" is a testament to Lopez's inner strength, as evidenced by the defiant chorus. ("It ain't all hearts and flowers/ So many nights and hours/ Every day of my life, in the grind faithfully/ Superpowers, we all got superpowers," she sings.)

"I'm a more evolved, healed person. I'm not saying I'm completely healed, or that I got it all figured out. I don't. But This Is Me... Now represents where I am in my journey right now," Lopez says.

"It's me embracing all of it, even the bad decisions," she adds. "I had to learn to be loving and forgiving of yourself, because then you can be loving and forgiving of other people. You can be empathetic toward other people and great for the world. But until you can give that to yourself, you can't do anything for anybody."

The Moments

Celebratory songs like lead single "Can't Get Enough," "This Time Around" and penultimate track "Midnight Trip to Vegas" have the same giddiness heard in 2002's "I'm Glad" and "Baby I Love U!" — the final two singles off This Is Me… Then . The autobiographical title track is a culmination of a lifetime, merging Lopez's working-class upbringing in The Bronx with the feeling of gratitude for a second chance at true love with Affleck. 

"I watched my mother miss out on her life/ All those could-have-beens became her sacrifice/ But here in the darkness, it's not the future nor the past/ And 'cause it's meant to be with you, boy, it will last," she sings in the opening verse. 

Stripped-down ballad "Broken Like Me" unflinchingly stands as Lopez's most personal work to date, as she deconstructs her J.Lo persona into diaristic lyrics that are bound to surprise even longtime fans. "Two babies at home/ Mama had to be strong/ In a battle for love/ In a war of my own/ And I tried to be honest/ But it made me feel weak/ And when I think about it/ It brings me to my knees/ Couldn't look in the mirror/ Afraid what I'd see/ 'Cause I still loved you/ Loved you more than me," Lopez confesses midway through the track, which moved Affleck to tears after hearing it for the first time.

"Ben would come in the studio and spend hours with us and tell us stories to help set the tone," Riester says. "I remember one moment where he said, 'Where's the pain that I went through of not being with the one that I love for so long?' That's how some of the darker songs like 'Rebound' and 'Broken Like Me' were born. It takes the dark to get to the light, and that's a really big theme of this album."

But there were plenty of fun, lighthearted moments, too; like how an Incredible Hulk -themed guitar autographed by Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige was used for "Mad in Love," a lullaby-esque anthem for soulmates everywhere. Or the night before "Midnight Trip to Vegas" was written, which pretty much sums up everything we love about Bennifer 2.0.

"Jennifer texted me and said, 'Hey, what are you doing today?'" Riester recalls. "I responded and then I didn't hear from her. The next thing I notice is all these news alerts that Jen got married, so I'm texting management like, 'Yo, what's going on? Did you guys not want to tell me about this?' They were like, 'We had no idea.'" 

He continued, "The whole team had been with her every single day for months, but we found out about it the way everybody else did. But it was an amazing story, because Ben was like, 'Everyone's so worried about all the different elements of this wedding. Let's just put it all aside.' I think that just shows you how much they love each other, because it wasn't about the wedding that's for everybody else. This is about their love for each other."

The Outcome

Whether you've been bumping J.Lo since her 1999 debut, On the 6 , or simply admire her work ethic, This Is Me… Now defies expectations as she reaches the pinnacle of creative freedom.

"This is truly an artist's project because it is her heart and her soul all pushed into a pen and written out for the world to see," Riester says. "I was telling someone the other day, 'When will an album rollout be like this again?' The story really is well-crafted and the music is incredible. Everyone can pull something from it because we've all been through those moments of heartbreak or finding what you think is your true love."

Days before announcing her first tour in five years, Lopez hinted that her ninth studio album, This Is Me... Now , may be her last ("I really feel very fulfilled," she recently told ET ). Whatever her musical future looks like, baring her soul and creating a cinematic experience with This Is Me…Now forced her to grow artistically in ways she never expected — which has brought an entirely new purpose to her remarkable career. 

"I've never done anything like this with a record in my life, or felt inspired to do anything like this with an album. This is the most honest record I've ever made," Lopez asserts. "I was able to do that because I was more mature and had done more work on myself to be really open and vulnerable in ways that I've never been. Everything about me is all in here. This is the album that I've been trying to make all my life — and I finally made it."

Jennifer Lopez's Biggest Hits, From Her Best Hip-Hop Collaborations To The Dance Floor Classics

Photo: Trae Patton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

New Music Friday: Listen To Songs From Ariana Grande, Lil Nas X, Jay-Z & More

The year is already off to a massive start, with Jan. 12 spawning new releases from 21 Savage, ITZY, Jennifer Lopez and many more. Check out some of the hotly anticipated tracks here.

January always marks fresh starts and clean slates as the world collectively turns the page from one year to the next. The world of music is no exception: the second week of 2024 is filled with artists embarking on new eras and album cycles.

On the full-length front, 21 Savage unveiled his third solo LP, american dream , with guest assists from the likes of Summer Walker ("Prove It"), Doja Cat ("N.H.I.E."), Young Thug and Metro Boomin ("Pop Ur S–t") and more while Kali Uchis celebrates her just-announced first pregnancy with longtime boyfriend Don Toliver by delivering her second Spanish-language studio set Orchídeas .

Meanwhile, Reneé Rapp brings the new Mean Girls musical movie to life as Gen Z's Regina George, with a soundtrack that also features Megan Thee Stallion , Auli'i Cravalho, Angourie Rice and more, and K-pop act ITZY makes a statement on their sophomore Korean-language album, Born To Be , which gives all five members a chance to shine with individual solo tracks on top of swaggering bangers like "Untouchable" and the title track.  

In addition to star-studded album drops , Jan. 12 sees several big single releases too. Press play on hotly anticipated musical resets from Ariana Grande and Lil Nas X , lead singles from Jennifer Lopez and Sheryl Crow , and a monumental collaboration between D'Angelo and Jay-Z for the new movie The Book of Clarence below.

Ariana Grande — "yes, and?"

Ariana Grande is officially back and ready to own everything . For "yes, and?" — her first new musical offering since 2020's Positions — the superstar is doling out heavy-hitting words to live by, disguised as a glossy pop confection that takes an irresistible cue from Madonna 's "Vogue."

Both an exercise in self-affirmation and a runway-ready Pride anthem, "yes, and?" finds Grande unapologetically sharing her truth in a way she hasn't since 2018's "thank u, next." Her voice dripping with honey, the soon-to-be Wicked star slyly addresses the recent tabloid fodder surrounding her personal life. 

"Now I'm so done with caring/ What you think, no, I won't hide/ Underneath your own projections/ Or change my most authentic life," she vows in between spine-tingling harmonies and plenty of vocal fireworks. Ari only gets more blunt from there, clapping back with her whole chest about the obsession with her body, relationship status, sex life and more. In her words, "Yes…and?" 

Jennifer Lopez — "Can't Get Enough"

Jennifer Lopez's ninth studio album, This Is Me… Now , has been a long time coming . But if lead single "Can't Get Enough" is any indication, the sequel to 2002's This Is Me… Then will be well worth the wait when it arrives Feb. 16. The track, which samples the late Alton Ellis' 1967 release "Still in Love," is a fizzy, funky delight that pops like a blast of champagne straight out the bottle.

On the song's chorus, the multi-hyphenate superstar giddily professes just how much she loves being in love (and back in love with now-husband Ben Affleck). And while the accompanying music video pokes fun at her trio of past marriages, fans can rest assured she's singing the lovestruck lyrics to the same Dunkin'-lovin' guy she was serenading 21 years ago on This Is Me… Then .

Jeymes Samuel x D'Angelo x Jay-Z — "I Want You Forever"

A new D'Angelo single would be a major event. So would a new Jay-Z single. After all, it's quickly coming up on 10 years since the neo-soul star released his last album, 2014's Black Messiah and the rap mogul's last solo single was the title track off 2017's 4:44 .

However, director Jeymes Samuel managed to coax both men back into the studio to join forces for the soundtrack of his new biblical film The Book of Clarence starring Lakeith Stanfield. On "I Want You Forever," D'Angelo holds court with a hypnotic, repetitive hook before ceding the mic to Hov for the song's lone, pleading verse. 

Lil Nas X — "J CHRIST"

Nearly three years after giving the devil a lap dance in the hellish music video for his No. 1 hit "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)," Lil Nas X is flipping the script and ascending to heaven on his new single "J CHRIST." Well, not for too long — turns out a giant stripper pole connects the celestial realm with the fires of purgatory, and Lil Nas X is equally at home in each.

The track's high-concept, cinematic music video has it all: angelic doppelgängers of everyone from Taylor Swift , Mariah Carey and Oprah to Michael Jackson and Barack Obama ; Lil Nas cooking up a cauldron filled with human limbs; and yes, even the rapper pinned to a cross in a visual sure to enrage the critics who were already up in arms before the track was even released. But by song's end, as Lil Nas X takes on the role of Noah emerging from a worldwide flood, the GRAMMY winner makes clear the hip-hop banger isn't just religious cosplay — it's a new beginning.

Sheryl Crow — "Evolution"

Sheryl Crow is uncharacteristically on edge on "Evolution," the lead single and title track of her forthcoming 11th studio album. The queen of bright singer/songwriter jams like "All I Wanna Do" and "Soak Up the Sun" (and newly inducted Rock and Roll Hall of Famer) takes aim at the encroaching threat of artificial intelligence to the music industry and creativity at large on the spacey track.  

To top it all off, she even recruited Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine to concoct a supercharged guitar solo that ratchets the uneasiness up to 11 as Crow warns, "Where are we headed in this paradise?/ We are passengers and there's no one at the wheel."

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Photo: Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Luisaviaroma

Everything We Know About Jennifer Lopez's New Album 'This Is Me… Now'

After months of buildup, Jennifer Lopez has finally announced the release date for her first album in a decade, 'This Is Me… Now.' Here's everything GRAMMY.com could find about it.

Way back in November 2002, Jennifer Lopez released This Is Me… Then — a highly personal looking-glass into her relationship with Ben Affleck. Twenty-two years later, the two-time GRAMMY nominee is closing the loop with the aptly titled This Is Me… Now .

Not only is there a yawning gap between prequel and sequel, but Lopez hasn't released a new album since 2014's A.K.A. (Unless you count the soundtrack to 2022's Marry Me , which she starred in alongside Owen Wilson and Colombian singer Maluma ; therein, she and Maluma performed the music.)

On Nov. 27, Lopez finally revealed the release date for This Is Me… Now , as well as a teaser trailer for a film of the same name — to be released on the same day. Here's a rundown of what we know about Lopez's long-awaited new dispatch to the world — over your speakers, and on your screen.

Both Album And Film Will Release Feb. 16

That's what Lopez revealed on Nov. 27. After you absorb the album, enjoy "an intimate, fantastical and narrative-driven reflection of Lopez's journey to find love" on Prime Video.

The First Single Will Stream On Jan. 10

Said single is titled "Can't Get Enough"; just days into the new year, you can cue it up. On social media, J. Lo also teased This Is Me… Now 's title track, with a snippet of the music.

This Is Me… Now Continues Its Predecessor's Love Story

Lopez and Affleck have a long history — much longer than This Is Me… Then could possibly contain. They first dated from 2002 to 2004; they called off their engagement in 2004.

In 2021, they began dating again; in 2022, they wed. All of this, permeated with the pressures of media attention and the growing pains of love, promises to live inside This Is Me… Now 's grooves.

"We captured me at this moment in time when I was reunited with the love of my life, and we decided we were going to be together forever. The whole message of the album then is this love exists. This is a real love," she told Zane Lowe last year.

"Now I think what the message of the album is very much if you were wondering if you have, like me at times, lost hope, almost given up, don't," Lopez continued. "Because true love does exist, and some things do last forever, and that's real."

This Is Me… Now Marks A New Label Partnership

Back in September 2023, Lopez announced a new recording and publishing partnership with BMG; This Is Me… Now will mark the first fruitage of this alliance.

"We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with her and her team to release her first album in nearly a decade," BMG CEO Thomas Coesfeld said in a statement.

Coesfield also called Lopez a "global superstar artist, entertainer… a phenomenon" — and that's exactly why This Is Me… Now will be such a milestone. Keep checking GRAMMY.com as more information about This Is Me… Now comes to light.

Photo: Daniele Venturelli/Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Luisaviaroma

Jennifer Lopez's Biggest Hits, From Her Best Hip-Hop Collaborations To The Dance Floor Classics

As fans await the much-anticipated arrival of J.Lo's new album, 'This Is Me…Now,' revisit the hits and deep cuts that have made her a beloved icon for nearly three decades.

Jennifer Lopez boasts one of the most impactful resumes in entertainment. Along with selling over 80 million albums and garnering four Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers , she has smashed barriers for Latin performers as a career chameleon — becoming the ultimate multi-hyphenate icon.

It feels almost unbelievable to think that J.Lo's balancing act was once deemed too risky. By the time she was releasing her debut album, On the 6 , in 1999, Lopez had made a name for herself in Hollywood thanks to her starring role in 1997's biographical musical drama Selena (which foreshadowed her power in the entertainment business, as her $1 million salary made her the highest paid Latina actress at the time ). Under the guidance of music mogul Tommy Mottola, On the 6 was met with much acclaim and propelled J.Lo into another stratosphere.

Now, nearly 25 years later, Lopez has released eight albums, starred in over 30 films — which have collectively grossed over $3 billion — and embarked on numerous business ventures, including her launch of JLo Beauty and alcohol brand Delola. Her fragrances alone have raked in over $2 billion.

Of the many hats Lopez wears, her music career is the most awe-inspiring for many of her fans. In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, and ahead of Lopez's eagerly awaited This Is Me… Now album (her first in nearly a decade), GRAMMY.com is revisiting the hits that made the Bronx native a household name, as well as lesser-known songs that rival even her biggest anthems.

"If You Had My Love," On the 6 (1999)

"If You Had My Love" was first offered to King of Pop, Michael Jackson , before finding a home on Lopez's debut album, On the 6 , named after a New York City subway line that she frequented before fame. On the Rodney Jerkins -produced tune, Lopez's assertiveness takes center stage as she addresses a potential lover: "Now if I give you me, this is how it's got to be/ First of all I won't take you cheating on me/ Tell me who can I trust if I can't trust in you/ And I refuse to let you play me for a fool."

Staying atop the Hot 100 for five consecutive weeks, "If You Had My Love" was undeniable proof that Lopez was capable of achieving crossover success in the music industry. It also coincided with 1999's "Latin Explosion" — which launched the careers of fellow Latin pop icons Shakira and Ricky Martin .   

"Waiting for Tonight," On the 6 (1999)

Of all of Lopez's smash hits, "Waiting for Tonight" is arguably one of the most timeless. As Lopez's first song to top the Dance Club Songs chart (she has since scored 18), "Waiting for Tonight" is synonymous with helping to usher in the Y2K era, thanks to its celebratory lyrics and accompanying New Year's Eve-themed video. It showed that she had critical clout, too, as "Waiting for Tonight" earned Lopez her first GRAMMY nomination for Best Dance Recording in 2000.

The Latin house anthem is so quintessentially J.Lo that it's easy to forget that it's a remake of short-lived girl group 3rd Party's song , further exemplifying her star power. What's more, it teased her future Spanish-language project, as she cut a sultry Spanish version titled "Una Noche Más" which closes out On the 6 .

"Let's Get Loud," On the 6 (1999)

On the 6 opens with a string of R&B tracks — including "Feelin' So Good" featuring Fat Joe and Big Pun — before taking a different turn with "Let's Get Loud," which flaunts Lopez's Latin heritage. Within the first few seconds, the proud Nuyorican declares "Ya Jeny llegó, presente!" (translating to "Jenny has arrived, present!"), and it's impossible not to dance along.

Co-written by Gloria Estefan , the salsa number mostly flew under the radar, never cracking the Hot 100. Even so, "Let's Get Loud" managed to score Lopez her second GRAMMY nomination for Best Dance Recording in 2001. It also remains one of J.Lo's signature songs, becoming a set list staple and playing part in career-defining performances, including the Super Bowl halftime show in early 2020 and Joe Biden's inauguration the next year.

"Love Don't Cost a Thing," J.Lo (2001)

A self-proclaimed "hopeless romantic," Lopez told potential suitors that her love don't cost a thing on her second album, J.Lo . Reaching No. 3 on the Hot 100 and even taking the top spot in several countries, the song's commercial success solidified her hitmaker status, simultaneously thrusting her relationship with then-boyfriend Sean "Diddy" Combs further into the spotlight. It's rumored that "Love Don't Cost a Thing" was aimed toward the Bad Boy Records founder: "When I took a chance, thought you'd understand/ Baby, credit cards aren't romance/ Still, you're tryna buy what's already yours/ What I need from is not available in stores," she sings in the second verse.

"Love Don't Cost a Thing" also kicked off Lopez's tradition of releasing catchy earworms like "I'm Glad," "I'm Into You," and "Marry Me" that chronicle the A-lister's quest for happily ever after.

"Walking on Sunshine," J.Lo (2001)

With anticipation-filled lyrics like "I can't wait, wanna see how this night is gonna be," "Walking on Sunshine" (not to be confused with Katrina and the Waves ' 1985 classic) sounds like a sequel to On the 6 's "Waiting for Tonight." Lopez even performed a mashup of the songs during her 2001 tour.

The infectious song follows platinum hits "I'm Real" and "Play" on J.Lo — and yet, it still manages to outshine both. At its core, "Walking on Sunshine" is pure bliss, and perfectly captures the dance-pop genre that flourished in the early aughts.

"I'm Real" (Murder Remix) feat. Ja Rule, J to tha L-O! The Remixes (2001)

Armed with a slinky smooth Rick James sample, Ja Rule 's grittiness paired with Lopez's soft coos are a match made in vocal heaven on the "Murder Remix" of "I'm Real," which pushed her more into urban territory after Black radio stations complained that her J.Lo album lacked an R&B-leaning single. (And Ja Rule screaming "What's my motherf—in' name?," to which Lopez responds "R-U-L-E, still reigns as one of the best opening lines in a song.)

Despite drawing criticism at the time due to Lopez's use of the n-word , the collaboration became so popular that it was added to the reissue of J.Lo , making the original version seem almost nonexistent — paving the way for more major reworkings of Lopez's songs, including "I'm Gonna Be Alright" and "Ain't It Funny." The latter started as a Latin pop record before being reimagined as a hip-hop track with all-new lyrics and an in-your-face "Flava In Ya Ear" sample, making it completely unrecognizable to listeners while serving multiple demographics.

"I ' m Gonna Be Alright" (Track Masters Remix) feat. Nas, J to tha L-O! The Remixes (2001)

Reworked for her J to tha L-O! The Remixes album, "I'm Gonna Be Alright" is easily Lopez's most forgotten hit — but it's one of her finest, thanks to Lopez's confident delivery, along with its captivating melody and resilient lyrics. "I said I couldn't do it but I did it/ After telling everybody that I wasn't with it," she sings on the chorus. "Though it brings tears to my eyes, I can feel it/ And that voice inside says I'm gonna be alright."

Featuring Nas (who replaced then-rising rapper 50 Cent , which ignited a feud between the two), and a sample of "Why You Treat Me So Bad" by Club Nouveau , "I'm Gonna Be Alright" stands out as one of Lopez's few singles that deal with a failed relationship.

"Still," This Is Me… Then (2002)

Creatively, Lopez was at the top of her game when her third studio album, This Is Me… Then , arrived in late 2002. Yet, it sold fewer copies compared to J.Lo , even despite producing megahits "Jenny from the Block" and "All I Have" (more on those later). As iconic as those songs are, they don't compare to the soulful album's opener "Still," which set the perfect tone for This Is Me… Then — her most romantic and sonically cohesive project to date.

Built around a sample of Teddy Pendergrass ' 1979 song "Set Me Free" and enhanced with synthetic record scratches for a retro feel, the lyrics heard in "Still" are actually quite simple. But it's the haunting melody and Lopez's sincerity that pulls in the listener immediately, and makes them wonder why it wasn't released as a single in lieu of "Baby, I Love U!," which stalled at No. 72 on the Hot 100.

"Jenny from the Block" feat. Styles P and Jadakiss, This Is Me… Then (2002)

It's a running joke that Lopez shouts out The Bronx every chance she gets, so it's only fitting that a song like "Jenny from the Block" exists in her arsenal.

Featuring The LOX 's Styles P and Jadakiss , "Jenny from the Block" teeters on pretentious as Lopez insists that fame and fortune haven't changed her. But fans and music lovers alike ate it up: The song spent three weeks at No. 3 on the Hot 100 and remains one of her most-streamed and highest-charting singles.

At the time, she was still riding high off making history as the first person to have a No. 1 album ( J.Lo ) and movie ( The Wedding Planner ) in the same week . By then, Lopez and then-boyfriend (and now husband!) Ben Affleck's romance had turned into total tabloid fodder, as seen in its accompanying video — which is infiltrated with shots of Bennifer on a yacht, grabbing lunch, and stopping for gas while the paparazzi captures their every move.

In a lot of ways, "Jenny from the Block" represents just how ubiquitous J.Lo was in the early 2000s. Outside the Bennifer craze, the rags-to-riches song remains an ode to Lopez's Bronx upbringing. It even birthed Becky G's "Becky from the Block" and seemingly inspired Fergie 's "Glamorous," which topped the Hot 100 in 2007.

"All I Have" feat. LL Cool J, This Is Me… Then (2002)

Lopez and LL Cool J 's chemistry is undeniable on "All I Have." Relying on a controversial sample of Debra Laws' "Very Special," the song's call-and-response quality is what makes it so fun to sing along to even after all these years.

Though the ballad showcases Lopez's softer side, female empowerment takes over: "'Cause I'm good holdin' down my spot/ And I'm good reppin' the girls on the block/ And I'm good, I got this thing on lock/ So without me you'll be fine, right," she sings on the song's pre-chorus.

"All I Have" not only became Lopez's fourth No. 1 hit, but thanks to its holiday-timed release and winter wonderland-themed video, it was dubbed a "Christmastime breakup theme."

"Get Right," Rebirth (2005)

In the three-year gap between This Is Me... Then and Lopez's fourth album, Rebirth , she hit a career low when Gigli bombed at the box office. She and Ben Affleck famously called off their engagement a mere five months later. Surprisingly, though, much of Rebirth is void of heartbreak and takes a lighter approach, as evidenced by the horn-laden lead single "Get Right," which sees Lopez enjoying herself at a club.

"My hips moving, oh, so slow/ Bar tab looking like a car note," she sings in the second verse. At face value, it's easy to view "Get Right" as just another dance tune, but it doubles as a metaphor for Lopez's openness to finding love again in the face of heartbreak.

"Qué Hiciste," Como Ama una Mujer (2007)

Lopez fully embraced her Puerto Rican roots from day one, recording Spanish-language and bilingual songs here and there, like 1999's "No Me Ames" and 2001's "Cariño." But after recording 2004's "Escapémonos," a duet with then-husband Marc Anthony , she was inspired to go all in — and she did so with 2007's Como Ama una Mujer .

A self-described "dream come true," Como Ama una Mujer spawned the rock-infused "Qué Hiciste" (translating into "What Did You Do"), Lopez's first Spanish-language song to crack the Hot 100 at No. 86 — though it ruled the US Hot Latin Songs chart. On the tune, Lopez sings from a scorned woman's perspective (e.g., "Hoy empañaste con tu furia mi mirada," which translates to "Today you clouded my gaze with your fury"), showing off her flair for drama with a blazing hot video to match.

"Stay Together," Brave (2007)

Seven months after Como Ama una Mujer 's release, Lopez returned to her more radio-friendly sound, but it came with a funky twist à la her sixth album, Brave . Lead singles "Do It Well" and "Hold It Don't Drop It" were lauded by music critics, though "Stay Together," the LP's opener, arguably steals the show.

On the pro-monogamy track, Lopez exudes confidence while dropping words of wisdom: "Through the bumpy roads, the others bite the dust/ 'Cause they be thinking they're in love when they're in lust."

"On the Floor" feat. Pitbull, Love? (2011)

Ahead of joining the 10th season of "American Idol" as a judge, "On the Floor" was the chart comeback Lopez needed after two back-to-back underperforming albums. The lead single off her seventh studio album, Love? , pays homage to her dance background as she sings lyrics like "If you're a criminal, kill it on the floor/ Steal it quick on the floor" over a thumping beat.

Heavily interpolating Kaoma's "Lambada" from 1989 and featuring guest verses from Pitbull , "On the Floor" skyrocketed to No. 1 in over 30 countries and became 2011's best-selling single by a female artist , reinstating Lopez's staying power. (To further prove its impact, there are two versions of "On The Floor" on Spotify — both of which have more than 400 million streams each.)

"First Love," A.K.A. (2014)

Lopez was dating backup dancer Casper Smart, who was nearly 20 years her junior, when she dropped the feel-good "First Love." Their age difference raised eyebrows, but in typical J.Lo fashion, she wore her heart on her sleeve.

On the percussion-heavy track, she sounds carefree while seemingly acknowledging her failed romances. "I wish you were my first love/ 'Cause if you were first/ Baby, there would have been no second, third or fourth love," she sings on the chorus.

Even though it didn't fare well on the Hot 100, it marked her first and only time joining forces with pop genius Max Martin . It also gave Lopez her 15th No. 1 dance hit, tying with Donna Summer for the seventh-most on the chart at the time. Earning three more No. 1 dance hits between 2014 and 2020, Lopez surpassed Summer with an impressive 18.

In the nine years that have passed since Lopez's last studio album, A.K.A. , Lopez has released dozens of one-off singles, including "Ain't Your Mama," "El Anillo," "Dinero," and "Medicine." Much to her fans' surprise and delight in the fall of 2022, she commemorated the 20th anniversary of This Is Me... Then with an announcement of This Is Me… Now , an aptly-titled sequel to her 2002 album. Lopez told Vogue that the forthcoming endeavor — which chronicles her rekindled relationship with now-husband Ben Affleck — is not only her most honest work to date, but "a culmination of who I am as a person and an artist."

While J.Lo has yet to announce an official release date, she just performed nine songs from the album at a special Apple Music Live show on Sept. 21. Once This Is Me… Now is finally unveiled, it will unlock a new era for the triple threat — one that only continues her awe-inspiring, ever-influential legacy.

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Photo: Erika Goldring/WireImage, Daniele Venturelli/Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Luisaviaroma, Scott Legato/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management, Astrida Valigorsky/Getty Images, Don Arnold/WireImage, Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images for Atlantis Paradise Island, Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

15 Must-Hear Albums This July: Taylor Swift, Dominic Fike, Post Malone, NCT Dream & More

From the highly anticipated 'Barbie' soundtrack to a celebration of Joni Mitchell's iconic Newport Folk Festival return, check out 15 albums dropping this July.

The first half of 2023 is already behind us, but July gives us much to look forward to. The warm sun, tours and festivals abound, and a heap of exciting releases — from Colter Wall's country music to NCT DREAM 's K-pop — will surely make this season even more special.

We start it off with Taylor Swift and her third re-recorded album, Speak Now (Taylor's Version) on July 7, the same day Pitbull returns with his twelfth studio album, Trackhouse . Post Malone will deliver his fourth LP, AUSTIN , and Blur returns with their first album in eight years. And for the classic music lovers, folk legend Joni Mitchell will release At Newport — a recording of her first live performance since 2015 — and rock maven Stevie Nicks will drop her Complete Studio Albums & Rarities box set.

To welcome the latter half of a year filled with great music so far, GRAMMY.com offers a guide to the 15 must-hear albums dropping July 2023.

Taylor Swift, Speak Now (Taylor's Version)

Release date: july 7.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)

Taylor Swift fans are used to gathering clues and solving puzzles about the singer's intricate, ever-expanding discography. Therefore, in her hometown of Nashville concert last May, when she announced that Speak Now (Taylor's Version) would come out on July 7, it was not much of a surprise to the audience, but rather a gratifying confirmation that they had followed the right steps.

"It's my love language with you. I plot. I scheme. I plan. And then I get to tell you about it," Swift told them after breaking the news. "I think, rather than me speaking about it ... I'd rather just show you," she added, before performing an acoustic version of Speak Now 's single, "Sparks Fly." 

Shortly after, she took it to Instagram to share that "the songs that came from this time in my life were marked by their brutal honesty, unfiltered diaristic confessions and wild wistfulness. I love this album because it tells a tale of growing up, flailing, flying and crashing … and living to speak about it."

Speak Now (Taylor's Version) is Swift's third re-recorded album, following 2021's Red (Taylor's Version) . It will feature 22 tracks, including six unreleased "From the Vault" songs and features with Paramore 's Hayley Williams and Fall Out Boy . "Since Speak Now was all about my songwriting, I decided to go to the artists who I feel influenced me most powerfully as a lyricist at that time and ask them to sing on the album," she shared on Twitter . Swift is currently touring the U.S. with her acclaimed The Eras Tour, which will hit Latin America, Asia, Australia, UK, and Europe through August 2024.

ANOHNI and the Johnsons, My Back Was a Bridge For You To Cross

"I want the record to be useful," said ANOHNI about her upcoming sixth studio album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross . The English singer says she learned with her previous LP, 2016's HOPELESSNESS , that she "can provide a soundtrack that might fortify people in their work, in their activism, in their dreaming and decision-making," therefore aiming to make use of her talents to further help and inspire people.

Through 10 tracks that blend American soul, British folk, and experimental music, ANOHNI weaves her storytelling on inequality, alienation, privilege, and several other themes. According to a statement, the creative process was "painstaking, yet also inspired, joyful, and intimate, a renewal and a renaming of her response to the world as she sees it."

My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross "demonstrates music's unique capacity to bring harmony to competing, sometimes contradictory, elements" — qualities that can be observed in the album's contemplative pre-releases "It Must Change" and "Sliver Of Ice."

Pitbull, Trackhouse

GRAMMY-winning singer/rapper Pitbull has recently broadened his reach into an unexpected field: stock cars. Together with Trackhouse Entertainment Group founder Justin Marks, he formed Trackhouse Racing in 2021, an organization and team that participates in the NASCAR Cup Series.

Now, to unite both passions, the Miami-born singer is releasing Trackhouse , his twelfth studio album and first release since 2019's Libertad 548 . "In no way, shape, or form is this some kind of publicity stunt," said Mr. Worldwide of the upcoming album during a teleconference in April. "This is real. This is all about our stories coming together, and that's why the fans love it. […] This right here is about making history, it's generational, it's about creating a legacy."

Preceded by singles "Me Pone Mal" with Omar Courtz and "Jumpin" with Lil Jon , it seems that Trackhouse , despite its innovative inception, will continue to further Pitbull's famed Latin pop brand. This fall, he will also join Enrique Iglesias and Ricky Martin on The Trilogy Tour across the U.S. and Canada.

Dominic Fike,  Sunburn

Multitalented singer, songwriter and actor Dominic Fike also joins the roll of summer comebacks. His second studio album, Sunburn , comes out July 7, and follows 2020's acclaimed What Could Possibly Go Wrong.

In recent years, the Florida star found great exposure after landing a role in the HBO hit series "Euphoria" as well as the upcoming A24 drama Earth Mama , which is slated to release on the same day as Sunburn . The past three years were also marked by collaborations with a handful of artists, from Justin Bieber ("Die For You") to Paul McCartney ("The Kiss of Venus") to his Euphoria co-star Zendaya on "Elliot's Song" from the show's soundtrack.

Sunburn marks Fike's joyful return to music, aiming to portray "the aching and vulnerable revelations of a young artist still growing and putting their best foot forward," according to a press release. Through 15 tracks, including singles "Dancing in the Courthouse," "Ant Pile," and "Mama's Boy," Fike will explore themes of "heartbreak and regret, addiction, sex, and jealousy." 

One week after Sunburn 's arrival, Fike will embark on a tour across North America and Canada, starting July 13 in Indianapolis.

Lauren Spencer Smith, Mirror

Release date: july 14.

Lauren Spencer Smith said on TikTok that she's been working on her debut album, Mirror , for years. "It has been with me through so much in my life, the highs and the lows, and it means more to me than I can put into words. It tells a story of reflection, healing and growth," she added.

The 19-year-old, British-born Canadian singer is unafraid to dive deep into heartbreak and sorrow — as she displayed on her breakthrough hit "Fingers Crossed" —  but offers a way out by focusing on her growth. "I went through a hard breakup, and the album tells the story of that all, the journey of that and now being in a more happy relationship. The title comes from the one thing in my life that's seen me in every emotion through that journey — my bedroom and bathroom mirror."

Like a true Gen Zer, Smith has been teasing the 15-track collection and its upcoming world tour all over social media . On July 14, the day of the album release, she kicks off the North American leg of the tour in Chicago, before heading to the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Colter Wall, Little Songs

"You might not see a soul for days on them high and lonesome plains/ You got to fill the big empty with little songs," sings Colter Wall on the titular track off his fourth studio album, Little Songs . The Canadian country star says in a press release that he wrote these songs over the last three years, and that "I penned most of them from home and I think the songs reflect that."

Born and raised in the prairies of Battle Creek, Saskatchewan, Wall found inspiration in the stillness of his surroundings. With this album, he bridges "the contemporary world to the values, hardships, and celebrations of rural life" while also opening "emotional turns as mature and heartening as the resonant baritone voice writing them," according to a press release.

Little Songs is composed of 10 tracks — eight originals and two covers (Hoyt Axton's "Evangelina," and Ian Tyson's "The Coyote & The Cowboy.") He'll celebrate the album's release with a performance at Montana's Under The Big Sky festival on the weekend of the LP's arrival.

Mahalia, IRL

British singer Mahalia celebrated her 25th birthday on May 1 by announcing IRL , her sophomore album. Out July 14, the R&B star claims the album to be "a real reflection of the journeys I've had, what actually happened, and a celebration of everyone who got me there."

The 13-track collection will feature names like Stormzy and JoJo , the latter of whom appears on the single "Cheat." Before the release, Mahalia also shared "Terms and Conditions," a self-possessed track that pairs her silky voice with delightful early-aughts R&B.

"I'm so proud of this album, and so proud of how much I challenged myself to just let those stories out," she said in a statement. "We're all fixated on how we can make ourselves better but I want people to also reminisce on lovely or painful situations they've lived through and how they've helped shape the people they are now."

IRL is Mahalia's follows 2019's highly-acclaimed Love and Compromise . In support of the release, she has announced UK and Europe tour dates from October through November.

NCT DREAM, ISTJ

Release date: july 17.

The Myers-Briggs Personality Test (also known as MBTI) is a current craze in South Korea, therefore, it was only a matter of time until a K-pop group applied its insights on their music. Although none of NCT DREAM's seven members has the ISTJ personality type, that's what they decided to call their upcoming third studio album, out on July 17.

The 10-track collection comes in two physical versions: Introvert and Extrovert, the first letters and main differentiators in any MBTI personality. Spearheaded by the soaring "Broken Melodies," where they display an impressive set of vocals, their comeback announcement on Twitter promises "The impact NCT DREAM will bring to the music industry."

Since September, the NCT sub-group embarked on The Dream Show 2: In A Dream World Tour, which crossed Asia, Europe, North America. The group will wrap up July with four concerts in Latin America.

Blur, The Ballad of Darren

Release date: july 21.

"The older and madder we get, it becomes more essential that what we play is loaded with the right emotion and intention," said Blur 's guitarist Graham Coxon in a statement about The Ballad of Darren , the band's ninth studio album set to arrive on July 21.

Maybe that explains why The Ballad is their first release in eight years, and represents "an aftershock record, reflection and comment on where we find ourselves now," according to frontman Damon Albarn . During a press conference in May, bassist Alex James reinforced the positive moment that they find themselves in, stating that "there were moments of utter joy" while recording together.

Produced by James Ford, the album contains 10 tracks, including the wistful indie rock of lead single "The Narcissist." On July 8 and 9, Blur is set to play two reunion gigs at London's Wembley Stadium, followed by a slew of festivals across Europe, Japan and South America.

Barbie: The Album

The most-awaited summer flick of 2023 also comes with a staggering soundtrack. Scored by producers Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt , Barbie: The Album features songs by hot stars like Dua Lipa , Lizzo , and Ice Spice, as well as some surprising additions, such as psychedelic star Tame Impala and K-pop rookie sensation Fifty Fifty .

As undecipherable and alluring as the actual movie plot, the album tracklist only increases expectations for Greta Gerwig's upcoming oeuvre. Is it all a satire? Is it a serious take on "life in plastic" and consumerism? Is it about nothing at all? You can try to find some clues through pre-release singles "Dance the Night" by Dua Lipa, "Watati" by Karol G, and "Angel" by PinkPantheress.

Greta Van Fleet,  Starcatcher

Fans who attended the three final shows of Greta Van Fleet 's Dreams in Gold Tour this March already got a sneak peek of the band's upcoming third studio album, Starcatcher . Among their most popular hits, the quartet played five new songs — or half of Starcatcher — including singles "Meeting the Master," "Sacred the Thread," and "Farewell for Now."

In a statement about the album, drummer Danny Wagner said that they "wanted to tell these stories to build a universe," and that they wanted to "introduce characters and motifs and these ideas that would come about here and there throughout our careers." Bassist Sam Kiszka adds: "When I imagine the world of Starcatcher , I think of the cosmos. It makes me ask a lot of questions, like 'Where did we come from?' or 'What are we doing here?' But it's also questions like, 'What is this consciousness that we have, and where did it come from?'"

Just a few days after release, Greta Van Fleet will embark on a world tour. Starting in Nashville, Tennessee on July 24, they will cross the U.S. and then head over to Europe and the UK in November.

Post Malone, AUSTIN

Release date: july 28.

In a shirtless, casual Instagram Reel last May, hitmaker Post Malone announced his upcoming fourth studio album, AUSTIN , to be released on July 28. Titled after his birth name, the singer shared that "It's been some of the funnest music, some of the most challenging and rewarding music for me, at least" — a very different vibe from the more mellow, lofi sounds of 2022's Twelve Carat Toothache — and that the experience of playing the guitar on every song was "really fun."

Featuring 17 tracks (19 on the deluxe version), AUSTIN is preceded by the dreamy "Chemical" and the angsty "Mourning," and sees Malone pushing his boundaries in order to innovate on his well-established sound. The album will also be supported by a North American 24-date trek, the If Y'all Weren't Here, I'd Be Crying Tour, starting July 8 in Noblesville, Indiana and wrapping up on August 19 in San Bernardino, California.

Stevie Nicks: Complete Studio Albums & Rarities box set

To measure Stevie Nicks' contribution to music is an insurmountable task. The Fleetwood Mac singer and songwriter has composed dozens of the most influential, well-known rock classics of the past century ("Dreams," anyone?), also blooming on her own as a soloist since 1981, when she debuted with Bella Donna .

In the four decades since, seven more solo albums followed, along with a trove of rarities that rightfully deserve a moment in the spotlight. Enter: her upcoming vinyl box set, Stevie Nicks: Complete Studio Albums & Rarities . The 16xLP collection compiles all of her work so far, plus a new record with the aforementioned rarities, and is limited to 3,000 copies. It's also the first time that Trouble in Shangri-La , In Your Dreams , and Street Angel are released on vinyl. For those who can't secure the limited set, a version of Complete Studio Albums & Rarities with 10xCDs will be available digitally.

Joni Mitchell, At Newport

Last year's Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island was one to remember. During one evening of the fest, a surprise guest graced the " Brandi Carlile and Friends" stage: it was none less than legendary folk star, Joni Mitchell. And what's more? It was her first live appearance since 2015, when she suffered a debilitating aneurysm.

During that time, the 79-year-old singer quietly held "Joni Jams" at her home in Los Angeles — inviting musicians that ranged from Elton John to Harry Styles to participate — with organizational support offered by Carlile. With Mitchell's special appearance at Newport, the coveted experience of a Joni Jam was available for thousands of fans.

This month, the release of At Newport eternalizes the headlining-making moment, bringing her talents to an even bigger audience. Among the classics in the tracklist are "Carey," "A Case of You," and "The Circle Game," proving that Mitchell is still as magical as when she stepped on the Newport Folk Festival stage for the first time, in 1969.

Jennifer Lopez, This Is Me… Now

Release date: tbd.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jennifer Lopez (@jlo)

In 2002, J.Lo was everywhere. Her relationship with actor Ben Affleck ensued heavy attention from the media, and her This Is Me… Then album — which featured hits like "Jenny from the Block" — was a commercial success, with over 300,000 first-week sales in the U.S.

How funny is it that, 20 years later, the singer and actress finds herself in a similar situation. After rekindling with Affleck in 2021, she announced the sequel to her 2002 release, This Is Me… Now , and stated in an interview with Vogue that the album represents a "culmination" of who she is.

A press release also describes This Is Me… Now as an "emotional, spiritual and psychological journey" across all that Lopez has been through in the past decades. Fans can also expect more details on the new-and-improved Bennifer, as many of the titles among its 13 tracks suggest, especially "Dear Ben Pt. II."

Although an official release date has not yet been revealed, on June 29, Lopez posted a cryptic image on social media with the caption "album delivery day" — suggesting that the highly anticipated This Is Me update may not be far away.

Everything We Know About Olivia Rodrigo's New Album 'Guts': Release Date, New Songs & More

• 1 Inside Jennifer Lopez's 'This Is Me... Now': The Superstar & Her Team Detail Why The New Album Is Unlike Anything She's Done Before
• 2 New Music Friday: Listen To Songs From Ariana Grande, Lil Nas X, Jay-Z & More
• 3 Everything We Know About Jennifer Lopez's New Album 'This Is Me… Now'
• 4 Jennifer Lopez's Biggest Hits, From Her Best Hip-Hop Collaborations To The Dance Floor Classics
• 5 15 Must-Hear Albums This July: Taylor Swift, Dominic Fike, Post Malone, NCT Dream & More

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Movie Review: J.Lo’s very wacky, very wild, very J.Lo journey to love in ‘This Is Me … Now’

This image released by Prime shows Jennifer Lopez in a scene from “This Is Me...Now: A Love Story.” (Prime via AP)

This image released by BMG shows cover art for “This Is Me…. Now” by Jennifer Lopez. (BMG via AP)

Ben Affleck, left, and Jennifer Lopez arrive at the premiere of “This Is Me... Now: A Love Story” on Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2024, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

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OK, so maybe we’re not tracking her jet travel online like amateur spies, or worrying on a diplomatic level whether she’ll make it to a football game.

But current Swift-mania aside, let’s not forget that another force of nature, J.Lo, has been the ultimate celebrity for decades. Singer. Dancer. Rom-com actor, charismatic and charming. Social media queen, and yes, tabloid magnet, with the very public ups and downs of her love life. Jennifer Lopez, now 54, has been doing this pop goddess thing for a very long time, and very well.

All of which is to say that when she sings now that she and her lover — Ben Affleck, obviously — don’t need to give a $%& about how others feel, well, who are we to argue? Who are we, really, to argue with J.Lo about anything?

Which is perhaps the perfect vantage point from which to assess the curious 65-minute creation that is “This is Me… Now: A Love Story,” the movie accompanying her album out Friday. Some will call it a mere music video — it’s directed by Dave Meyers, who’s done hundreds — but it’s heftier than that. And if the plot feels truly chaotic, blending (deep breath here, please) mythology, astrology, autobiography, confessional, modern romantic comedy and Old Hollywood glamour (still with us?), it is so J.Lo — so very, very J.Lo — that it feels logical, too.

What is Jennifer Lopez up to?

• Q&A: J.Lo is releasing her first album in a decade in tandem with a movie. She says the projects poke fun at her romantic past and were inspired by Ben Affleck .
• Movie Review: In “This is Me … Now,” J.Lo puts it all on the table with an undeniably heartfelt and wacky film chronicling her lifelong journey to true love, AP critic Jocelyn Noveck writes.
• Album Review: In J.Lo’s first solo album in a decade, the singer takes back her rightful place on the throne of pop music, AP critic Martina Rebecca Inchingolo writes.
• Met Gala: Lopez will join Vogue’s Anna Wintour as one of the co-chairs of this year’s Met Gala , along with Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth and Zendaya.
• Watch: See the AP’s full sit-down interview with J.Lo.

Whether that means the film is, well, good, is probably a matter of how you feel about Lopez. Certainly, she’s brought everything to the table here: her talents, her fertile imagination and her wallet, too, self-financing when money fell through, to the tune of a reported $20 million. Talk about self-belief, which is the moral of the film, if expressed rather too quickly and conveniently. If you can’t love yourself, Lopez and co-writer Mark Walton tell us, you can’t really love anyone else.

Anyway, we told you there was a plot, so here goes. Lopez, though channeling her own life, doesn’t have a name in the film — she’s billed as “Artist.” But before we meet her, we begin with Puerto Rican mythology: the story of Alida and Taroo, star-crossed lovers from enemy tribes. They can’t be together, so the gods turn her into a red flower (Lopez appears in the animation as Alida), and Taroo into a hummingbird, destined to forever seek her. The Artist heard the tale as a child and decided what she wanted to be when she grew up: “in love.”

Now we see the modern Artist on the back of a motorcycle, riding across a beach, with a hunky man, face shielded. Then, screech — the motorcycle crashes. “Not all love stories have a happy ending,” she says.

The Artist’s adventure with love takes us to a “Metropolis”-like sequence in a very dystopian-looking factory, its purpose not fully clear but in any case a great setting for one of many dance numbers. Lopez still has it, if you wondered. Turns out, though, the depleting oxygen and dancers in hazmat suits are all part of a dream. We learn this in the Artist’s therapy session the next day with her shrink (rapper Fat Joe) .

He asks how it’s going with the new guy. Not so well, it turns out — the guy’s a Libra (astrology is ever-present) and, more to the point, violent, as we learn in the song “Rebound” about a toxic relationship, with a powerful dance sequence that has her continually pulled back into an abuser’s clutches.

Time for the Zodiac Council to weigh in. Yes, up in the stars, led by Jane Fonda , yes Jane Fonda, not as J.Lo’s mother-in-law this time but as Sagittarius, yes the sign, who peers down at our girl and says: “I don’t get it!” Yup, agrees Libra, played by Trevor Noah — Libras and Leos are supposed to go well together. And so it goes, with others chiming in: Keke Palmer as Scorpio, Post Malone as Leo, Sofia Vergara as Cancer, Kim Petras as Virgo and even astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as Taurus.

This wacky group is a celestial counterpart to a band of well-meaning friends down on Earth, those typical rom-com buddies who stage an intervention into her love life. Is the Artist is a sex addict? A love addict? Another addiction — to weddings, wink wink! — is explored in a big number where Lopez marries three different grooms.

It won’t shock you that the Artist ultimately learns to love herself, with a return to her roots (this is, after all, Jenny From the Block). If she didn’t, we wouldn’t have an audacious — but fun — recreation of Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain.” We also wouldn’t have reason to hear the triumphant songs that comprise the new album, coming more than 20 years after “This is Me … Then,” written during her first go-round with Affleck.

Famously, they broke up. Famously, they reunited. (Now-husband Affleck appears here, in a sly cameo we won’t spoil.) We watched it all. And we’ll keep watching this most durable of superstars. There will be more to come. But this is her, now.

“This Is Me … Now: A Love Story” a Prime Video release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 65 minutes. Two stars out of four.

Screen Rant

This is me... now director on symbolically sharing jennifer lopez's life through music.

This Is Me... Now: A Love Story director Dave Meyers shares the challenges he and Jennifer Lopez faced while bringing her cinematic vision to life.

• This Is Me... Now: A Love Story combines Jennifer Lopez's personal history and high-profile relationships into a narrative-driven cinematic odyssey.
• Director Dave Meyers brings his experience from working on Lopez's music videos to create a spectacle that showcases the artist's vulnerability and offers a unique interpretation of her music.
• Ben Affleck provided support and input during the filming of the project, reflecting the real-life romance between him and Lopez, which adds depth to the movie's exploration of love.

The journey to This Is Me... Now: A Love Story 's release is worthy of its own movie, but Jennifer Lopez's newest project provides plenty of food for thought already. Premiering on Prime Video at the same time as her latest album (appropriately titled This Is Me... Now ) becomes available on streaming platforms, the movie comes steeped in J. Lo's personal history. Though not a documentary or even strictly biographical, This Is Me... Now deals directly with Lopez's high-profile relationships and more indirectly with the road that led her to her husband, Ben Affleck.

This Is Me... Now: A Love Story is directed by Dave Meyers, who worked on several of Lopez's music videos from her two-decade-old album, This Is Me... Then . The reunion is a significant one, seeing as the celebrated actor's album is a spiritual sequel to the previous one. It also serves as Meyers' feature film directorial debut, though viewers may debate if it is indeed a feature film. The new project touches on themes from her acting work as well ( such as 2022's Marry Me ), but the end result is something entirely new and specific to Lopez as an artist.

Every Jennifer Lopez Movie Ranked

Screen Rant interviewed Meyers about the surprising challenges that arose during the filming of This Is Me... Now and how Lopez rose to the occasion every time. The director also shared how Affleck showed up for his partner and reflected on his hopes for future feature-length collaborations.

This Is Me... Now Is Not Quite A Movie, But Much More Than A Music Video

Screen Rant: Something that Jennifer says a lot is, "This is not a music video." Music videos, however, are where you live. How different was your approach to this? What did you have to shift the most?

Dave Meyers: At the very start, we wanted it to be a narrative. What I zeroed in on when I met with Jen was her vulnerability and the story she was telling of this journey. I kind of extrapolated that, but there was still a utility that she has an album coming and there was these songs, so there was a little bit of telling the story and then realigning which songs go with which parts of the film that create this cram box of Jen. That's how I designed most of my stuff, whether it's a video or commercial or whatever else. This was meant to take all of what I see Jen to be and what she's offering in this moment in time and try to put that to the test. So, she's an action star in the opening; she's vulnerable in the Love AA [meeting]. I'm leaning into different emotional challenges that aligned with the story she was telling me. The video side of me, I suppose, is the natural [impulse] just to create a spectacle out of things, and to create movement and rhythm. But I haven't really had the chance to exercise it over a long form. I see lots of musicals coming out, and I'm always like, "Well, God, they're so out of date to me." Not the content, but the way that they're shot is very traditional, 1950s kind of stuff. I just really thrived off the opportunity to create what Jen spoke about. In the music video space, we interpret music in at least a little more unexpected way, I guess.

Ben Affleck Was Jennifer Lopez's Rock During This Is Me... Now Filming

I know the budget was a challenge, but even outside of that, it feels like a living, breathing entity, where things have to change on the spot. What part of the movie would you say evolved the most from when you first set out to film it?

Dave Meyers: Funny enough, the bones of the movie are exactly the same as the treatment I sent her the first week in, from Fat Joe therapy to the Heartbreak. I looked at them as headliners that traveled through the journey of her 20 years and going into the darkness. You start splashy, and you just get into the depth of what she's going through, which is where the middle of the film starts to go. What changed? Topically, the zodiacs changed the most because we shot them all separately. Each time one did one, we would edit that in, and then we would do our own voices. Me and Jen would read the zodiacs and edit it together, and then the next one would come in and then we'd have to change [things]. Trying to understand what the zodiacs were meant to be and say, particularly because we wanted each of the people that participated to speak in their voice. We didn't know who we had; they came one at a time. That was probably the most challenging changing aspect. We probably had 50 drafts of the zodiac scripts. If you asked the zodiacs that were early on, they would be like, "Wow, that's not what I read." But the rest of the movie was noodled; the specific dialogue on each day. Jen is so much more, obviously, than just the star of this. It's also her truth, and she was dancing her heart out. Even with as much time as I was getting from her, which was impressive considering how much she was taking on, she also had another movie going on. She's a very busy person. But I found each morning of, we would go over what we were trying to achieve. And although we had spoken about it when we were writing together, we would make little tweaks, like therapy. She's like, "Oh, well, this is what I actually went through," and then we would try to figure out our hyper-stylized fiction and align that with some of her truth day by day. But that was pretty much on course with what we expected to happen. And then we had blessings from Ben Affleck . As certain scenes came up, Jen would be able to get him to have a review and do a little tweak here or there. [He was] kind of a ghost mentor. It was really a blessing to have him watching out for both of us really, and it was there. I don't know how much Jen wants to talk about that, but it was a beautiful part of this, especially since generally the movie is about love and the pursuit of love, to see them so happy. We didn't want to make the movie about Ben, but it's clear to the real world, and obviously in the [BTS] piece you spoke about, that there's a real strong, always-meant-to-be love that's going on there. I think the public may have their own opinions, and I think they'll hopefully have a nice time realizing the truth of their love.

Director Dave Meyers Is Ready For His Movie Career To Take Flight After This Is Me... Now

You mentioned the fun of seeing who's going to be part of the zodiac. How involved were you in that casting process? Was there anyone that you were really rooting for?

Dave Meyers: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. It was kind of like me and Jen at the house just fielding the chaos of this. She probably never will admit this, but it was definitely bold for her to be able to shine the light on herself in this way. I commend her courage for that. I'll leave it to her to speak to just how terrified or not terrified she was, but we had multiple castings. Me and Jen both went through our Rolodexes, and there were lots of nos and lots of yeses that became nos, and it was a journey. That's why we couldn't really organize it. I think four or five of the zodiacs we shot long after we actually shot the film, once we were in editing and stuff. I guess I'll take credit for Neil [deGrasse Tyson]. When I was seeing how it was shaping, Neil was someone that I just felt was an obvious choice. Once we saw the full picture, Jen agreed, and I think she loves what Neil did. But it was really just like two kids in a sandbox, talking and dreaming together, so I guess the zodiacs were a manifestation of that. There was a consideration for the types of voices, and that we cover the perspectives of the various zodiacs; that they represent a wider swath of culture. Because they were meant to be a loose metaphor for the social media and outside commentary on Jen's life. Some loving, some random, some a little more judgmental. It was an interesting scene to take on, and it's really fun to watch it now because it does look like they were all together.

Now that you have had this musical movie experience with Jen, are you thinking of branching out further in your directing and doing more feature-length films, with or without her?

Dave Meyers: I would love to do a feature-length film, and I would love to do another one with her. I would love to do one where it's not spending her own money because I think she and I would have just a little less stress. Although she never stressed me out, I could feel the encroaching challenges that were on her doorstep. We had so much fun making this that I can only imagine what it would be like when we can really just focus on character and eccentrics and whatnot. Yeah, I'd love to make a movie. It's been hard to get permission to make a film that has my fingerprint, I guess. I'm very proud of this film. It very much carries my fingerprint. I don't mean the music video aspect of it, I just mean the imagination in it is much more indicative of how I see myself, and I think sometimes you need that showpiece in order to get the conversations going. So, I hope I see you again in a period of time.

About This Is Me... Now: A Love Story

This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is like nothing you’ve ever seen from Jennifer Lopez. Alongside director Dave Meyers, Jennifer has created a narrative-driven cinematic odyssey, steeped in mythological storytelling and personal healing. Dropping in tandem with her first studio album in a decade, this genre-bending Amazon original showcases her journey to love through her own eyes. With fantastical costumes, breathtaking choreography, and star-studded cameos, this panorama is an introspective retrospective of Jennifer’s resilient heart.

This is Me... Now: A Love Story premieres February 16 on Prime Video.

Source: Screen Rant Plus

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Every Thought I Had Watching J.Lo’s This Is Me … Now: A Love Story

Jennifer Lopez has given us the gift that keeps on giving: herself. Today, Lopez releases her first studio album in ten years, This Is Me … Now , alongside an Amazon Prime–exclusive feature-length film titled This Is Me … Now: A Love Story . With an ellipsis, a colon, and a nod to her 2002 album This Is Me … Then , the title alone sets the tone for this maximalist musical-visual experience.

As we gleaned last month from its trailer , This Is Me … Now: A Love Story is no concert film à la Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour or Beyoncé’s Renaissance movie. Considering J.Lo already dropped a music video for “Can’t Get Enough,” it’s not exactly a visual album either. Nor is it a documentary — because there already is a documentary. It’s titled The Greatest Love Story Never Told , it will debut February 27 on Amazon Prime, and it will be the third and final component of J.Lo’s self-funded multimedia project. At the film’s (not the documentary) Wednesday premiere, director Dave Meyers compared the 65-minute film to a “mini Marvel movie.” Lopez herself has described the experience as “ a journey .” Still, questions remain: Is the movie good? Is it bad but in a good way? And is Ben Affleck in it or what?

I had the distinct honor of watching Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me … Now: A Love Story on the big screen earlier this week. Here is every thought I had while watching this hero’s journey–slash–musical romance–slash–vanity project. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

- If you’d like to re-create the experience of watching this movie in a theater, simply crank your stereo up to max volume and sit on top of it. The bass is so resonant in this movie theater, I feel like I have a Dolby Digital speaker in my ass.

- Okay, quiet down, class. We’re opening with a brief lesson in Puerto Rican mythology (J.Lo’s version). It’s “The Legend of the Hummingbird,” a story of star-crossed lovers who are turned into a rose and a hummingbird. Taroo, the man turned hummingbird, is fated to spend his existence flitting from flower to flower trying to find Alida, who was transformed into a red rose to escape her forced marriage to another man. Hmmm … is J.Lo the flower or the bird here?

- Oh my God: We are barely ten minutes in and J.Lo and her unnamed lover are in a motorcycle accident. Amid the crash, we zoom into J.Lo’s body and see her heart … but her heart is a giant steampunk engine (?) being maintained by all the gritty factory workers (??) who live inside J.Lo’s body (???). No time for comprehension, because we’ve arrived at our first dance break. This is “Hard-Knock Life” from Annie with aviation goggles and flower-centric metaphors.

- Oooh, it was all a dream. J.Lo is in therapy talking about it. Her therapist is rapper Fat Joe. This part is not a dream.

- Once again, no time to question or understand anything, including this casting choice, because J.Lo is dancing again. Her dances always deserve to be witnessed on the big screen. Why wasn’t J.Lo in the Step Up franchise? Was that beneath her? Anyway, J.Lo and a different lover are fight-dancing in a glass house. Are we supposed to infer that this is an allusion to an actual physically abusive relationship in J.Lo’s past? Is J.Lo dreaming again?? Am I???

- Aw, a wedding montage! With three different grooms! See, J.Lo can make a joke at her own expense! The grooms don’t seem to be one-to-one stand-ins for J.Lo’s first three marriages to Ojani Noa, Cris Judd, and Marc Anthony. But I am going to pretend that the husband played by professional dancer Derek Hough is inspired by Lopez’s former fiancé Alex Rodriguez.

- Aw, remember when A-Rod posted a tribute to J.Lo after they broke up? And the video was set to “Fix You,” by Coldplay? In many ways, that was A-Rod’s self-funded multimedia project.

- Dare I say, the constant CGI throughout the movie … works? It’s as over the top as everything else. We can add “magical realism” to the extensive list of genres this movie explores.

- Well, back to therapy with Fat Joe. J.Lo has been wearing a lot of pieces from the Gucci x Adidas collection. Maybe Gucci is the flower and Adidas is the hummingbird?

- Puppy! There’s a puppy! Okay, the movie is worth its reported $20 million budget.

- J.Lo has just come home to all of her friends. Sitting in her home. They’re holding a love intervention because she’s too obsessed with love! The friends don’t have names; they have character traits. There’s the Fighter, the Quiet One, the Idealist, the Lover, the Realist, and the Cynic. Wait, the Cynic has a name. It’s Mike.

- Hmmm, the puppy is now a ten-year-old dog accompanying J.Lo to a meeting of — and I cannot stress this enough — Love Addicts Anonymous (LAA). The thesis statement of the movie is that J.Lo loves love. Its supporting arguments include a lyrical-style chair dance with her fellow Love Addicts. The meeting leader is Sound of Metal ’s Paul Raci, who is absent for the musical sequence. Not even J.Lo could force him to learn the chair choreography.

- J.Lo’s main co-star in the movie is the concept of astrology. She makes a dig at Libra men and mentions several times that she is a Leo. There are cutaways to a Zodialogical Council, composed of Sofia Vergara , Keke Palmer , Jenifer Lewis, Jane Fonda , Post Malone, Trevor Noah, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Kim Petras , Jay Shetty, and the yogi Sadhguru. Each is playing a different star sign, though not everyone is portraying their actual star sign. I need the record to show that Keke Palmer is a Virgo, not a Scorpio, which she plays in the movie.

- If my thoughts seem scattered with jarring transitions, then I have done my job of accurately portraying the vibe of the movie. Some stray observations:

• There’s a scene in which J.Lo is watching The Way We Were , mouthing Barbra Streisand’s lines.
• While J.Lo and Fat Joe are doing inner child therapy, she imagines reconnecting with her childhood self in the Bronx.
• A childhood crush tells J.Lo that “flowers don’t grow in the Bronx,” and she responds, “Sometimes they do.” It’s confirmed: J.Lo is the flower.
• Sitting in front of her indoor fire-pit table, J.Lo burns a replica of an actual love letter Affleck wrote her in 2002. It reads, “Life’s tough but you’re sweet. Thanks for the gift. Hope you like the flowers. You told me you could never have enough. I believe you.”
• The floor tiles in her movie home say “JLO.”

- We end on a Singin’ in the Rain –style dance, and J.Lo finds love within herself … and an unnamed man who is definitely supposed to be Affleck. Gorgeous.

- As the credits reveal, Ben Affleck is indeed in the movie. He dons a wig and prosthetics to play a news pundit named Rex Stone who is interspersed throughout the film. Several people in the theater gasped.

Correction: A previous version of this story included reports of Sadhguru’s appearance fee. According to a spokesperson, Sadhguru had no fee.

• jennifer lopez
• ben affleck

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How Jennifer Lopez Found Happily Ever After

By Rob Haskell

Photography by Annie Leibovitz

Styled by Alex Harrington

On a disquietingly hot and windy October day at the outer edges of the San Fer­nando Valley, Jennifer Lopez—who has never been accused of lacking ambition—is saving the world. Not this world, though it surely also needs saving, but an imagined dystopia some century ahead in which robots, according to their frustrating custom, threaten the human race.

“To me, it’s a love story,” says Lopez, and she laughs.

She laughs because of course she would see it thus, because love is her big project in this world, her messy, public, decades-long, sometimes glamorous, sometimes treacherous, often thwarted project, the lens that when it comes down over her eyes can’t help but turn everything as pink as the six-carat diamond with which Ben Affleck proposed to her the first time, in 2002. But Atlas —the movie she is shooting today, part of a new deal between her film company, Nuyorican Productions, and Netflix—isn’t most people’s idea of a love story. In fact, it’s a straight-up sci-fi action thriller, in which Lopez plays a military intelligence analyst assigned to reconfigure a potentially lethal form of artificial intelligence. Though the costumery is more Mad Max than Wedding Planner, scholars of the Jennifer Lopez catalog will find in Atlas ’s protagonist a familiar character: the headstrong careerist with little time for life’s mushier feelings until the right man (or droid) comes along.

“Closed off. Totally obsessed with her work. Dealing with a lot of pain and sadness from her childhood,” Lopez continues, making an explicit allusion to the porousness that has characterized the relationship between her life and her art over the last three decades. “She has to learn how to let him in so that they can be stronger together.”

We are sitting between takes in her tent on the soundstage, where great efforts have been made to create an oasis on a hectic, buzzing set. Her favorite candle flickers on a cream-colored faux-shagreen desk, and a black Hermès blanket is draped over the massage table. In the little living room, a marble chess set rests on a marble coffee table, and above it hangs a green neon sign whose soft cursive reads “Mrs. Affleck.” It was a gift from the crew.

Lopez, her hair matted, her neck and temple caked with fake blood, is surprised to learn that a few days after her marriage this July, The New York Times published an opinion piece expressing disappointment that at a moment when feminist ideals felt imperiled in America, Lopez had taken her husband’s name. (She shared this news, along with a few photos of the family jaunt to Vegas, in her free, subscription-based “On the JLo” newsletter, where her biggest fans get a not overly filtered but nevertheless highly curated monthly update about her life.)

LOVE IS IN THE AIR Lopez wears a Valentino Haute Couture dress. Leibovitz’s portrait is a tribute to photographer Gordon Parks’s iconic photo essay of the singer and actress Eartha Kitt for LIFE in 1952.

“What? Really?” she asks. “People are still going to call me Jennifer Lopez. But my legal name will be Mrs. Affleck because we’re joined together. We’re husband and wife. I’m proud of that. I don’t think that’s a problem.” You mean there’s no part of you that might want Ben to be Mr. Lopez? She laughs. “No! It’s not traditional. It doesn’t have any romance to it. It feels like it’s a power move, you know what I mean? I’m very much in control of my own life and destiny and feel empowered as a woman and as a person. I can understand that people have their feelings about it, and that’s okay, too. But if you want to know how I feel about it, I just feel like it’s romantic. It still carries tradition and romance to me, and maybe I’m just that kind of girl.”

That Lopez has pursued love across four marriages, two broken engagements, and assorted misbegotten alliances over 25 years should be news to almost no one. Neither is the fact that her great romantic experiment has coincided with a relentless professional momentum, an enormously productive and still expanding career (more than 30 movies, eight studio albums, a dizzying array of branding endeavors), and now, at the age of 53, an untouchable aura that somehow contains glamour, grit, and goodness all at once. While it sometimes seems as if Beyoncé might live on a small, satin-upholstered space station, Lopez, despite her aura, has remained accessible, real, gears exposed, Jenny from the block and all that. Though she possesses an unusually deft touch with the press, dusting the trail with crumbs and remaining an object of extreme media fascination for a quarter century, Lopez has also built more walls around her over the years.

“In the beginning I was of the mind that I could say or do anything,” she recalls. “I was from the Bronx, and who didn’t say what they thought there?” Her early relationship with Affleck offered a cruel lesson, as the tabloid press denigrated her with racist and classist dog whistles; South Park parodied her viciously, and Conan O’Brien told his audience that the show’s “cleaning lady” would be playing Lopez in a sketch. “We were so young and so in love at that time, really very carefree, with no kids, no attachments. And we were just living our lives, being happy and out there. It didn’t feel like we needed to hide from anybody or be real discreet. We were just living out loud, and it turned out to really bite us. There was a lot underneath the surface there, people not wanting us to be together, people thinking I wasn’t the right person for him.” Over the ensuing years Lopez has seemed to gather a force field around her, as if weaponized against derisive scrutiny. “I became very guarded because I realized that they will fillet you. I really wish I could say more. I used to be like that. I am like that. But I’ve also learned.”

Lopez would like especially to say more about the journey back to Ben Affleck, which, really, has been a journey of self-discovery that began around 12 years ago, when she was newly separated from the singer-actor Marc Anthony and suddenly a single mother of twin babies. It was the professional and emotional low point of her career: A couple of albums had sputtered, and she no longer seemed to be getting the movie offers that had flowed in in previous years. Financially strained and somewhat aimless, in 2011 she accepted a job as a judge on American Idol, which, to her great surprise, reinvigorated her career. It turned out that the human touch was what her audience, and the industry, needed from her.

“It was like, Oh! That’s all I had to do this whole time was be myself? Although it was a competition, it was a reality show,” she explains, “and I had never done one. Up until then we only had what the media was telling you about me. I loved meeting the kids because I so identified with their dreams—I just loved it. There were a lot of things that people saw through that show, but more than anything I think they saw my heart, that I was a cool, funny person, that I was a nice person. No matter how many awards shows you do or late-night talk show couches you sit on, people feel like you’re putting something on. With a reality show, you can’t hide behind a script or a four-minute interview. You’re out there.”

At the same time, Lopez was privately beginning a process of self-reflection and self-improvement that emanated from the experience of motherhood. Motifs had emerged in her unsuccessful romantic relationships, which she felt ready to disrupt. “I just didn’t understand what it was to care for myself, to not put somebody else’s feelings and needs—and your need for them to love you—in front of taking care of yourself,” she says. “You turn yourself into a pretzel for people and think that that’s a noble thing, to put yourself second. And it’s not. Those patterns become deep patterns that you carry with you, and then at a certain point you go, Wait, this doesn’t feel good. Why am I never happy? I really felt that way for a long time. And finally I was just like, Ugh! It’s time to figure me out because I need to be good for these babies. And even from there, with all the willingness I had, it took years and years to really put the pieces together, like, Oh, this thing I do because of this, that thing I do because that happened to me at this age.”

AIRTIME “The two of us, we lost each other and found each other,” Lopez says of Ben Affleck, whom she wed this summer. Dior jacket, bra, and skirt. Alaïa boot.

Lopez grew up in the Castle Hill neighborhood of the Bronx, in what she describes as a typical working-class Puerto Rican household. Though her background has been overmined for clues to future greatness—the strict upbringing, church every Sunday, early exposure by her mother to musicals, an impressive high school athletic career—two details stand out. Guadalupe Rodríguez was a young mother, fun and performative but tough as nails and sometimes overwhelmed with her three daughters, not above resorting to corporal punishment with them, which Jennifer has tried to understand as the custom of the time and place. “We respected her, but we also feared her,” she recalls. “She did what she needed to keep us in line.” And David Lopez, her father, worked nights and wasn’t always available to his family. When they divorced, after 33 years of marriage, Jennifer recalls, it came as a shock, though perhaps it shouldn’t have.

Over the course of our discussions, Lopez alludes to encounters with self-help texts, meditation, psychotherapy, psychiatry, and life coaching. She appears to have attacked the project of working through her childhood trauma, and its present-​day reverberations in the form of unhealthy attachments, with the same intensity she has brought to her career pursuits. “My parents taught me the value of hard work and the importance of being a good person,” she explains. “But the combination of them was what I’ve had to figure out. It shaped what I liked as far as my personal life was concerned. Without infringing on their privacy, that was it: Who your mom is and who your dad is and how they love you and teach you to love become the positive and negative patterns that you have to overcome in life.”

Lopez and I meet for breakfast at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, at a table in the very back of the garden, in front of which a large potted privet creates the safety of vagueness. The restaurant is a sort of default meeting place for the residents of high-hedged neighboring enclaves such as Bel Air and Holmby Hills, and she arrives without security. Privacy is important to her, but it’s also important that people understand that she is not asking for anyone’s sympathy for the tariffs of fame. “The other day,” she recalls, “one of my kids said, ‘I want to go to the flea market.’ I was like, ‘Oh, you want me and Ben to come?’ They said, ‘You know, it’s such a thing when you go, Mom.’ It hurt my feelings. I get it. They want time with their friends when they aren’t being watched and followed and photographed. It’s a thing. Nobody’s complaining, but it’s a thing.”

She eats a bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon and sugar, a popular Puerto Rican breakfast, as her mother made it, and drinks a decaf cappuccino (she gave up caffeine years ago). She wears a black denim jacket with the collar turned up, her hair is pulled into a tight bun, her skin is preternaturally youthful—​perhaps the twin effect of DNA and the olive oil–rich tinctures in her JLo Beauty line. (To answer a question that many people asked me after we met, yes. She is absolutely as beautiful in person.)

“I’m not one of these tortured artists,” Lopez says. “Yes, I’ve lived with tremendous sadness, like anybody else, many, many times in my life, and pain. But when I make my best music or my best art is when I’m happy and full and feel lots of love.” Such was the mood that surrounded the writing and recording of her forthcoming album, which will be her first in nearly a decade. I’m not allowed to reveal the title, but suffice it to say that it serves as a kind of bookend to This Is Me…Then, the album she released 20 years ago in the heady early days of her relationship with Affleck.

Lopez’s longtime manager, Benny Medina, told me that Lopez has a way of falling in love with whatever she is immersed in at the moment. While she has several films out in the coming months, including the rom-com-with-a-twist Shotgun Wedding this winter and The Mother, in which she stars as an ex-assassin, in the middle of next year, it is this album that pulls Lopez’s enthusiasm at the moment. She says that it will be the most honest work she has ever done, “kind of a culmination of who I am as a person and an artist. People think they know things about what happened to me along the way, the men I was with—but they really have no idea, and a lot of times they get it so wrong. There’s a part of me that was hiding a side of myself from everyone. And I feel like I’m at a place in my life, finally, where I have something to say about it.” She lends me her AirPods so that I can listen to a few rough cuts from the record. There are plaintive, confessional songs, reflections on the trials of her past, upbeat jams celebrating love and sex. As I’m listening, I notice that she has closed her eyes, and she is dancing in her chair and singing along to her own voice. For a moment it occurs to me that she might be treating me to a little performance, but no, she is just so into it.

LIFE IN FULL “I want my kids to stand up for themselves,” she says. “I want all the little girls in the world to get loud. Get loud!” Marc Jacobs jacket, bustier, and skirt. 

You might say that Lopez has been in a kind zone since 2019–2020, the period that she regards as her career’s peak so far. She delivered a critically heralded performance in Hustlers, her most successful movie to date; she completed a 38-show, international concert tour, also her most successful to date; she walked the runway for Versace in a reincarnation of her iconic green jungle-print Grammys dress on the occasion of its 20th anniversary (and held her own, she thought, in a sea of 19-year-old models); she co-headlined the Super Bowl halftime show; and she turned 50. “It was like, fashion! movies! music! It was all coming together,” she recalls. She also felt emboldened to take a public political stand, adding a segment to her Super Bowl set in which Latinx children, among them her own child, Emme, sang her hit “Let’s Get Loud” from inside cages—a rebuke against the Trump administration’s injustices at the border. According to Lopez, the NFL initially wanted to cut the act from her program, but she held firm.

“Early in my career people would ask about politics, but I always felt like people didn’t really want to hear from an actor or somebody who sang pop songs,” she remembers. “Like a shut-up-and-dance kind of situation. I didn’t have the confidence, and I didn’t want to make a mistake. But you get to a point in your life where you realize, if something’s wrong, you say it. If you’re not doing something about it then you’re kind of complicit. Whether it was kids in cages, or kids getting shot in the street by police—all these things where it was just like, What the hell is going on around here? When did we lose our way? There were so many awful, ugly attitudes coming to light. It was really sad because it didn’t need to be political. It was about being a good person, loving your neighbor, all the things that people say they stand for but then they don’t practice because somebody’s not the same as them or somebody has a different sexual orientation or gender identity or a different race. It’s like, Really? You can’t just do you? You can’t just be you and be happy and let somebody else be happy too?”

She says the Affleck-Lopez home in Los Angeles is a place where this newly blended family (her 14-year-old twins, his three children from his marriage to Jennifer Garner, ranging in age from 10 to 17) is passionate and vocal about a range of political and social issues. “This generation is beautifully aware and involved and brave,” she says, “and they will call bullshit on stuff really quick. I want my kids to stand up for themselves and the things they care about. I want all the little girls in the world to get loud. Get loud! Say it when it’s wrong. Don’t be afraid. I was afraid for a long time: afraid to not get the job, to piss people off, afraid that people wouldn’t like me. No.”

Lopez’s intimates know that she has always held a candle for Affleck. Shortly after she and the retired baseball great Alex Rodriguez called off their engagement in early 2021, she got an email from the actor-director, who had just come out of a relationship with the actress Ana de Armas. A magazine had asked Affleck for a comment about Lopez, and he wanted her to know that he had provided a rave. They kept talking. They started visiting each other at home. “Obviously we weren’t trying to go out in public,” she explains. “But I never shied away from the fact that for me, I always felt like there was a real love there, a true love there. People in my life know that he was a very, very special person in my life. When we reconnected, those feelings for me were still very real.”

NATURAL WONDER The new album is on its way and Lopez has a pair of films coming out next year— Shotgun Wedding and The Mother. Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello jacket, blouse, skirt, and brooch.

She says that she and Affleck are as stunned as anyone else to have managed to recapture an early, important love, and the fairy-tale ending-ness of it all continues to amuse them. (This is not to say that she is rolling her eyes. Lopez believes in the fairy tale. A plaque displayed at their wedding, held at Affleck’s home in Savannah, Georgia, this August, a month after they were legally married, read, Love always hopes and always perseveres .) “I don’t know that I recommend this for everybody,” she says. “Sometimes you outgrow each other, or you just grow differently. The two of us, we lost each other and found each other. Not to discredit anything in between that happened, because all those things were real too. All we’ve ever wanted was to kind of come to a place of peace in our lives where we really felt that type of love that you feel when you’re very young and wonder if you can have that again. Does it exist? Is it real? All those questions that I think everyone has. You go through all these relationships, and you’re searching and you’re connecting and you’re disconnecting with people, and you’re like, God, is this just what life is? Like a carousel, roller coaster, carnival ride? And then it settles. But the journey to that is the mystery for everybody.”

Though she did not use this word, my sense is that Lopez and Affleck are both in a kind of recovery, in their separate ways. Affleck has struggled with alcoholism for more than 20 years and more recently worked hard toward building a lasting sobriety. If Lopez has had a parallel compulsion, it is in the domain of love, and she has done her work, too. “I have to forgive myself for the things that I did that I’m not proud of, the choices that I made that worked against me,” she explains. “Self-love is really about boundaries. Learning what you’re comfortable with and putting up the boundaries, not being afraid of the consequences. Knowing that in taking care of yourself, everything will turn out okay, that people will treat you the way you want to be treated and your life will feel good to you. For a long time, I was just like, Yes, do whatever you want! I can take it, I’ll be here, because I’m really strong, and I’ll be fine. Little by little it chips away at your self-worth, your self-esteem, your soul.”

The couple has brought a lot of thought to the project of integrating their households, and they are learning about parenting from each other. Affleck’s ex-wife is, Lopez says, “an amazing co-parent, and they work really well together.” Lopez does not have the benefit of such a relationship with her ex-husband, who lives on the East Coast. “The transition is a process that needs to be handled with so much care,” she says. “They have so many feelings. They’re teens. But it’s going really well so far. What I hope to cultivate with our family is that his kids have a new ally in me and my kids have a new ally in him, someone who really loves and cares about them but can have a different perspective and help me see things that I can’t see with my kids because I’m so emotionally tied up.”

Of course, Lopez is raising children with a great deal more privilege than she enjoyed at their age, and she hopes that her own model for hard work goes some way toward keeping them grounded. “It’s hard, in its own way, when you don’t have to fight for things, because then you don’t learn how to be a fighter,” she says, boxing at the air with her fists. “I had to learn how to be a fighter. I wanted to give them a life that I didn’t have, but they don’t get to have the experience of something that is also helpful, which is developing that survivalist mentality.” She has made a point of stepping out of her mother’s shadow as a parent, trying not to raise her voice, keeping her temper, not matching her children when they rev up. “I really wanted to find a better way than having to put the fear in them. It’s like, I can hold a boundary with you but also be your ally. That’s the balance, where they respect you enough because you act in a way that they can look up to. It’s what I feel like I want to do because when I was young that wasn’t what it was.”

HEAD TURNER “I’ve always felt like an outsider,” Lopez says, “in the fashion world, the music world, the movie world.” Maison Margiela dress.

And yet Guadalupe Rodríguez worked hard to teach her daughters to be good as well as great. It’s a lesson Lopez is keen to pass on. “I’ll stress to them, like, I want you to do well in school,” she adds (her twins started high school this fall), “and then my son always finishes the sentence. He goes, ‘But you care more that we’re good people.’ I say, ‘That’s right. I do.’ The beauty of being a parent is that you think you’re going to teach them all these things, and you do. You pass on all the things that you know, all the knowledge you have. But at the end of the day they wind up teaching you so much and reminding you of the things you need to know about life and how to love somebody and how to care for people, that in your 20s and 30s, as you’re doing your own thing, you can lose sight of. We get so self-centered at certain points in our lives when we have our goals and our things.”

Affleck, for his part, is glad that his wife tolerates his singing in the shower. To him, the big draw all these years later was not the ways Lopez has changed but the ways she has not. “There is something innately, magically kind and good and full of love at the heart of who Jennifer is,” he explains. “That’s exactly the person I remember from 20 years ago. Maybe she sees all the changes she’s made, whereas when I see her, mostly I just see someone who has retained, against the odds, the thing about her that always made her the most incredible to me: a heart that seems boundless with love. She is my idea of the kind of person I want to be.”

SEEING GREEN Lopez’s first new album in nearly a decade will be the most honest work she has ever done, “a culmination of who I am as a person and an artist.” Balenciaga Couture dress.

Lopez has grand, multimedia plans for her current musical project. She wants to create a musical odyssey in the manner of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, she says—but with a message about hope and love. Perhaps the most poignant moment in Halftime, the documentary about her Super Bowl year released on Netflix last June, occurs when Lopez is reading out loud from an article about herself in Glamour. “It’s thrilling to see a criminally underrated performer”—here she pauses, and tears well in her eyes—“get her due from prestige film outlets.” In fact Lopez did not quite get her due, having been denied an Academy Award nomination, which some in the industry viewed as a snub. A Grammy continues to elude her, too. Despite her stardom, she has spent years fighting for credibility, and for all her artistic accomplishment, to some people she is, simply, Jennifer Lopez for a living. This hurts less than it once did.

“I’ve always felt like an outsider, in the fashion world, the music world, the movie world,” she explains. “I feel like everybody knows each other and all the artists talk, and you go to the Met ball and all the girls are hanging out together, and I’m not in that group. Maybe that’s just insecurity. It’s not because I’m antisocial or I don’t want to make friends. I’ve always been kind of a march-to-the-beat-of-my-own-drum, loner-type person. I’m like, I’ll just stay focused on my thing. I’ve always kind of felt like that. I still do. But I try! It used to be about the idea of validation in other people’s eyes. It really used to be. Because I wanted to be part of the club. But I don’t anymore. There’s something bigger that I’m after. It’s about touching people’s lives and being touched.”

Twenty years ago, in an era that has sometimes been referred to as Bennifer 1.0, Affleck gave Lopez the nickname “Little.” At six foot four, he is nearly a foot taller. When they reunited, he told her that he wasn’t sure if that old moniker still applied, that she seemed somehow too fully realized to be called “Little” even affectionately. But the pet name has returned, even as Lopez has come to seem like the dewy-skinned den mother of us all, a force for good on a sometimes dark planet. Growing up, getting there, has been her life’s work, on top of all that…work. “You come out the other side, and you’re better, you’re stronger, you’re good on your own,” she says. “But there’s a little piece of that former self that was totally open, innocent, and unafraid, that is gone. Sometimes I mourn that, because I’m such a romantic.” Her voice has softened to a whisper. “And because I loved that person so much.

“My whole life, my whole music career was just about love: every movie I picked, every album I made. Even though I’m super proud of who I am today, and I wouldn’t change a fucking thing—and I can finally say that, as a human being, as a woman, as a partner, as a wife, as a coworker, as a mother and stepmom—there’s just that little piece where you feel like, That old me? She was sweet.” 

In this story: hair, Chris Appleton for Color Wow; makeup, Mary Phillips.  

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Jennifer Lopez talks about personal journey behind new project

Jennifer Lopez sits down with TODAY's Hoda Kotb to discuss her new album and musical experience "This is Me… Now: A Love Story" on Prime Video. “It’s a story of a hopeless romantic,” she says. She also opens up about her journey with Ben Affleck, saying, "When you really find somebody that you can love in that way, it kind of doesn't go away, and that doesn't change... love is not a straight line."

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Published on 2/26/2024 at 10:00 AM

If you had a hard time understanding Jennifer Lopez's recent music video project "This Is Me... Now: A Love Story," her documentary "The Greatest Love Story Never Told" might answer some of your questions. In the doc, Lopez shares that the inspiration behind both "This Is Me... Now: A Love Story" and her ninth studio album, "This Is Me... Now" (both of which released on Feb. 16), was to finally set the record straight about her love life.

"I've been married four times now. I'm sure people watching from the outside were like, 'What is this girl's fucking problem?' You saw kind of a compulsive behavior," Lopez says in the documentary's introduction. "What I portrayed to the world was, 'Oh this didn't work out and it's fine and I'm good and they're good.' And all of that was kind of bullshit."

The documentary goes behind the scenes in the making of both the film and the album, and Lopez also walks viewers down the last two decades of her personal life. She admits all those back-to-back marriages and relationships were a result of not being good with herself.

"I didn't think much of myself. So the world didn't think much of me. That lined up," she says in tears.

She also reveals that part of the inspiration behind her self-financed multimedia project was getting back with the love of her life and now-husband, Ben Affleck, who appears in both the musical (as an incognito character) and the documentary. Lopez shares that she was completely devastated after their 2004 breakup because she felt like she didn't just lose the love of her life but also the best friend she'd ever had. The public scrutiny that followed only made things worse.

Similarly to the musical film, the documentary touches on Lopez's love life for the past 20 years, the reason she was in constant search for love, and her love story with Affleck. But more importantly, it highlights her self-love journey and explores why it took her so long to get to a better relationship with herself.

"'This Is Me... Now' is about truth and facing the truth of who you really are and embracing that, and the truth is I'm not the same as I was 20 years ago," she says.

In the documentary, Lopez shares how being the middle child made her constantly feel a need to show her parents and family that she had value and worth. She felt ignored by her dad, who was always working, and her mom, whom she claims was always the center of attention. Feeling emotionally neglected forced her to become hardworking and disciplined, she says, and somewhere down the line she started seeking the love she didn't feel she received growing up from men.

At first, it was hard for me to believe that Lopez isn't the same person she was 20 years ago — at least when it comes to her love life and her need to constantly be in a romantic relationship. When have we ever seen her single? Very shortly after her breakup with baseball star Alex Rodriguez in 2021, she was already being publicly seen with Affleck. Can someone really get over their fear of being alone and their need to constantly be in partnership without ever taking a significant break from dating? I'd argue no. But in the doc, Lopez admits there was a period when she did finally embrace singlehood.

In the musical, there's a scene where Fat Joe, who plays her fictional therapist, asks her if she has "ever considered being alone for a minute." Her incognito character begins to break down in tears. Lopez admits in the documentary that the scene with Fat Joe parallels an actual conversation she had with a therapist.

"I used to be terrified to be alone," Lopez shares. "I didn't know what I was going to do by myself. Who was going to take care of me? Who was going to protect me? This one therapist said to me, 'Can you be alone?' And I was like, 'I can do it. I can be alone. I can be alone. I'll be alone until Christmas.'"

Lopez's therapist suggested she erase everyone from her phone who might pose temptation. According to Lopez, she listened and took some significant time to be alone and address whatever it was she needed to heal — like feeling emotionally abandoned as a child.

It's been easy for some fans to dismiss Lopez's recent projects — the film, the album, and the doc — as silly or unnecessary. But I couldn't help but empathize with her after having more insight into her journey and the things she's struggled with when it comes to love and relationships. I now believe Lopez when she says she took the time to be alone and heal — whenever that was.

Ultimately, it's clear that investing $20 million in this project was for herself, not for fans or viewers. Documenting her own journey was more a therapeutic act of self-love than anything else. Lopez likely didn't put out these projects to be nominated for awards or because she believes they'll be major hits; she put them out because they were the final process in her healing journey.

If these projects do anything, I hope they inspire viewers struggling with self-worth to take the time to reflect, heal, and give themselves the self-love they've always deserved. Because at the end of the day, the only love that we can guarantee in this life is the love we can give ourselves.

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A Very Necessary FAQ for Jennifer Lopez’s ‘This Is Me … Now: A Love Story’

Did J.Lo make a 55-minute musical about her relationship with Ben Affleck? We have the answer to that question, and more.

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You may have heard that Jennifer Lopez made her own autobiographical version of Cloud Atlas where she journeys through time and space to heal her heart through the redemptive power of self-love and flower petals. You may have heard that her journey includes a steampunk Flashdance homage and a Ben Affleck jump scare and that Jane Fonda leads a sort of Greek-chorus-meets– Inside Out think tank of celestial beings. And those rumors (all true) may have stirred up some questions in your soul like: why, how, who, and huh ? But perhaps most importantly: What on Jane Fonda’s green earth did we do to deserve such a thing?

Now, the tone with which you ask that last question might depend on how you typically respond to the artistic stylings of one Jennifer Lynn Lopez. Do you see her as a visionary? A Hollywood septuple threat ? An artist constantly reinventing herself? A star who’s outkicked her talent coverage but continues to iterate on a public persona that’s never been particularly convincing as a contemporary auteur?

Nah, not that last one—this movie rules. It is singularly weird, and should be treated as such!

This Is Me … Now: A Love Story (huge win for punctuation) makes not a lick of narrative sense, and yet it is a masterpiece—as long as the barometer for what constitutes a masterpiece is “being extremely Jennifer Lopez.” One thing I’ve always respected about J.Lo is that she is going to sell you J.Lo , whether you meant to walk into the J.Lo shop or not. Was anyone expecting a sequel to her 2002 album This Is Me … Then 22 years later? Certainly not. (Except maybe J.Lo—why else would she name her album that in the first place?) Was anyone demanding that J.Lo make a visual album? I don’t think so. (Except, again, J.Lo , who is never not saying, “I guess I’ll just have to DO IT myself ,” about an artistic endeavor that is entirely and wholly about … herself.) But then Jennifer Lopez reunited with Ben Affleck, the man she dedicated This Is Me … Then to in 2002, called things off with three days before their planned wedding, then got back together with and ultimately married 20 years later. Such a reunion deserved something more than just a sequel album.

So, from the heart/soul/dreams of Jennifer Lopez comes a 55-minute-long narrative musical that Amazon paid to distribute, once again dedicated to the epic love she and Ben Affleck share. In one sense, This Is Me … Now: A Love Story is a visual album for This Is Me … Now , which also dropped on February 16. In every other sense , however, J.Lo has made a 55-minute movie about a Leo learning to love herself while singing and dancing her way through two decades of romantic misadventures. It is the most Jennifer Lopez thing Jennifer Lopez has ever done in a career that has always been fully devoted to performing at max Jennifer Lopez. It is the ultimate continuation of J.Lo telling what she sees as her hero’s journey: a mission to be understood by a society that has been inaccurately consuming her artistry and personal life for nearly three decades …

Casting yourself as the underdog with a self-funded budget of $20 million ? Iconic behavior. There is no other celebrity this insistent upon reminding us that she is an artist. To be fair, though, I’ve never seen art quite like This Is Me … Now: A Love Story . It is as if Michael Scott was given an eight-figure budget to make Threat Level Midnight , or if The Room was created by a legion of astrology-obsessed musical theater nerds instead of Tommy Wiseau . Like those films, This Is Me … Now is pure camp most especially because of its creator’s sincere belief in its artistic significance. J.Lo is the FUBU of pop stars—everything she makes is for Jennifer Lopez, by Jennifer Lopez—and this celestial steampunk odyssey is no different.

I believe that Jennifer Lopez loves these 55 minutes of musical cinema she’s created, and that’s enough for me. But for anyone who’s not Jennifer Lopez, you may have some questions about the facts and figures of This Is Me … Now: A Love Story . The movie will not tell you outright why Jennifer Lopez’s robot heart is powered by flower petals, or why her character exclusively resides in terrifying futuristic homes made entirely of glass—so I’m here today to answer some common questions that may arise regarding everyone’s favorite new movie featuring both ellipses and a colon in the title.

Is this a musical? A movie? A musical movie? A movie musical?

Stunningly, This Is Me … Now: A Love Story is yet another entry into this year’s canon of films that don’t fully spell out that they’re musicals in their trailers. Sure, the This Is Me … Now trailer was scored by Jennifer Lopez’s “This Is Me … Now” song . But I kind of just assumed the movie would be that: scored . But no, Jennifer Lopez is breaking into song and dance at all times in this movie. That makes it a musical.

From the trailer, I’d also assumed this would be a feature-length film. But, again, no ! It is a 55-minute movie that according to J.Lo should not be classified as a music video, yet it also isn’t nearly long enough to be feature length. So what is it? The trailer tells us it’s a “new INTIMATE, CINEMATIC, MUSICAL experience,” and you know what? I agree: Jennifer Lopez’s first self-written, self-funded, and self-starring creation certainly is a “new … experience.”

Does J.Lo play herself in this musical movie?

Let’s be absolutely clear: This Is Me … Now is autofiction. In the opening scene, we see Jennifer Lopez on the back of a motorcycle with a man who looks a lot like Ben Affleck (played, in silhouette, by Ben Affleck), which then crashes while traversing a lake, signifying the greatest heartbreak of her life. In the narrative of the film, J.Lo is reunited with that man once more after 10 years, three divorces, and a journey through time and song to find love with the most important person in her life: herself. These are not the precise details of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s sprawling love story, but they’re close …

And yet, Jennifer Lopez’s character isn’t called Jennifer Lopez. She’s called “ the Artist .” We only actually learn that from the movie’s closed captioning (“[ The Artist laughs ]”), as the movie works very hard to never call the character by a name—y’know, like Fleabag , if Fleabag was always doing intricate chest choreography instead of speaking directly to camera.

There are certainly indicators that the Artist is supposed to be world famous like J.Lo, but we learn absolutely nothing beyond the fact that she is permanently unlucky in love. “I know what they say about me, about hopeless romantics, that we’re weak,” the Artist says in one of her many monologues to her therapist. “But I’m not weak . It takes strength to keep believing in something after you keep falling flat on your face.” Some might also say it takes strength to produce nine studio albums and over 30 feature films and co-headline the Super Bowl … but that’s a story for a different for-J.Lo-by-J.Lo production. (It’s called Halftime , and she already made it, obviously .)

This movie is about love and love only . Ultimately, the Artist’s monologue ends with the line, “I believe in soulmates and signs and hummingbirds.” Because her name is the Artist, not the Writer.

OK then, so is Ben Affleck in this movie?

Ben Affleck … is in this movie. The entire point of the movie, after all, is that every mistake J.Lo has ever made in her life—every liquor-swilling boyfriend who’s ever broken any one of her metaphorical and also quite literal (in this movie) glass houses—has been leading back to Ben Affleck. So, obviously … in this movie … Affleck plays a TV commentator named Rex Stone, wearing a Donald Trump wig and a Mrs. Doubtfire prosthetic nose, and also occasionally proselytizing the news in the background of scenes. This character makes exactly no sense, but in one scene he does manage to deliver the film’s entire thesis statement when he says, “In 2012, the no. 1 question people asked was, ‘What is love?’”

I was wondering when Ben Affleck was gonna show up in J.Lo’s new movie and then I realized HE WAS ALREADY THERE pic.twitter.com/jwI2kk6CDC — (@EmmaTolkin) February 17, 2024

Sorry, what people ? Asked who? Why is 2012 the reference point here? The answer to all of those questions is: It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters in the world is love . And if you’re wondering what the “top questions” people ask now are, according to Rex Stone, they’re: “Where my refund? Why women kill? Will I get laid? Is Europe a country? How I screenshot a Mac? Am I preg-erant? And why my poop green?”

It’s the funniest sequence of the movie, and I would bet my On the J.Lo newsletter subscription that Ben Affleck wrote that little diddy himself.

So how does this movie communicate a complicated timeline that spans 20 years, three divorces, and multiple time jump dream sequences?

In a word: bangs. Anytime we cut to J.Lo and she has bangs, we are in the present. Anytime she doesn’t have bangs, she is either in the past, in a dream, or in some version of the present (recent past) that she’s relaying to her therapist.

J.Lo’s bangs are as critical to the plot of This Is Me … Now as the robot heart that’s powering the Artist’s metaphysical world (more on that in a minute). But because J.Lo is eternally ageless, at times we also have to rely on a basset hound puppy aging into an elder basset hound to understand that J.Lo has spent the last decade or so growing, healing, and preparing her heart to love Ben Affleck again.

What inspired Jennifer Lopez to make this movie?

Other than Ben Affleck, I have several theories: moments that occurred throughout the film that made me think, “This line/scene/image has clearly been rattling around in Jennifer Lopez’s head for a decade, so she decided to create an entire $20 million passion project around it.” They are as follows:

• When she says to one of her future ex-husbands (played by the famously blond adult male Derek Hough), “You feel like home to me … but I left home for a reason .” J.Lo loves this line, you can just tell.
• The movie opens with a million AI-rendered images of Jennifer Lopez depicted within the Puerto Rican folktale of Alida and Taroo … and I just know that Jennifer Lopez got one look at herself as a Greek goddess or a space explorer in December 2022 and thought, “ I HAVE to get this imagery to the people. ”
• J.Lo learned a lot about astrology at some point, it made her realize a bunch of stuff about herself (classic Leo), and she decided to spend $20 million relaying that information to the public.
• J.Lo did inner child work with a therapist. Quite literally, there is a dream sequence in this movie in which J.Lo apologizes to her younger self on the dark and dirty streets of the Bronx, and once she does, the sun comes out, and both J.Los break into song. Of course, we know it’s a dream sequence because the Artist is relaying it to her therapist, Fat Joe.

Is Fat Joe a licensed therapist?

From what I can tell, no . But he does wear a full beige outfit with all the confidence and gravitas of your richest aunt, so he’s at least believable as a therapist. Also believable? That J.Lo would try to pry personal details out of her therapist in order to bond. (“You’re such a Taurus. What sign is your wife?”)

You said we’d get back to this: Why is Jennifer Lopez’s heart powered by flower petals?

Right. After the Artist crashes on the motorcycle, signaling the greatest heartbreak of her life, we’re taken inside the Heart Factory, where an oiled-up and tank-topped Jennifer Lopez is yelling, “It’s gonna break!” I don’t know how to convince you that I’m not lying to you about the events of a J.Lo musical, but I promise I am not. There is a giant metal heart pulsing above the factory workers which has apparently reached “critical petal levels.”

That’s right. Jennifer Lopez’s heart is powered by flower petals, and the only way to save it is for Jennifer Lopez to get in a jumpsuit, walk a gangplank out to the heart, journey inside its destructing valves, and start feeding rose petals to the dwindling fire that powers it while simultaneously breaking into the song “Hearts and Flowers” ( get it??? ) with the rest of the workers down on the factory/dance floor.

It’s not until a little later in the movie that we learn this was a dream sequence (no bangs— I should have caught it ), and much later in the movie, we see the petal levels stabilize enough to repair the broken heart. So yeah, Jennifer Lopez is basically just Being John Malkovich –ing inside her own heart for like 20 years (well … earth years, robot-heart years may be measured differently), trying to save herself so she can marry Ben Affleck.

You’re telling me Jennifer Lopez’s Ben Affleck movie stages an elaborate reference to Armageddon ?

That’s exactly what I’m telling you.

Are there any other dream sequences in this movie?

I’m pretty sure that any scene that doesn’t happen directly in the presence of Fat Joe himself is a dream sequence, or at the very least a recounting of a dream or memory by the Artist to her therapist, which, again, is Fat Joe. These include, but are not limited to: the aforementioned heart factory, a love addiction intervention, the shattering of a glass home via physical abuse, watching a healing round of The Way We Were on a custom monogrammed Gucci-esque couch, and, of course, a Singin’ in the Rain homage. So you might be wondering …

Is there a wedding montage in this movie?

Oh yeah, you betcha. And it’s amazing . The Artist married three men across 10 years, one song (“To Be Yours”), and several wedding dresses. The first wedding dress features two heart-shaped mesh cutouts that perfectly frame J.Lo’s crotch. Romance!

Perhaps more unexpected, however, is the couples therapy montage , wherein all three husbands sit in front of Fat Joe alongside the Artist (this feels like a psychiatric moral gray area, Fat Joe). Dialogue selections include: “I’m a piece of art in her collection,” and, “I feel like I’m just another thing in her house.”

What I wouldn’t give to be a Gucci-monogrammed sectional in J.Lo’s house! But ultimately, the Artist grows tired of all of these uninspiring men, leaves them behind in their own futuristic houses, and starts fucking around with a bunch of dummies. Her friends are forced to give her an intervention, and Fat Joe recommends joining Love Addicts Anonymous …

Is Love Addicts Anonymous a real thing?

Technically it’s called “Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous,” but yes , it is indeed a real 12-step program (though J.Lo makes sure to clarify that she is not a sex addict in her autofictional musical movie). At J.Lo’s Love Addicts Anonymous meetings, you’re led by veteran character actor Paul Raci, and you express yourself exclusively through modern dance.

A particularly rich piece of dialogue comes when Paul Raci tells the Artist, after her impromptu performance of “Broken Like Me,” that “I know you feel like no one gets you.” To which Jennifer Lopez—a woman who is in the middle of making an hour-long music video about herself—responds: “I don’t even get me.”

But that was J.Lo … then. And this is J.Lo … now . And this J.Lo … has read her birth chart.

Do you need to have a casual understanding of astrology to understand this movie?

It would certainly help! Even though the movie starts with a Puerto Rican folk tale that continues to proliferate through the movie in the form of a hummingbird (bet you didn’t see a J.Lo neck tattoo coming!), we’re really expected to come in with our own knowledge of the zodiac.

Bare minimum, knowing at least a little about all 12 astrological signs will really help color in the Zodiacal Council when it shows up …

What is a Zodiacal Council?

Oh, well it’s a collection of humanoid representations of the 12 star signs who watch over the Artist from the heavens as she fumbles her love life. They are exposition machines who say things like, “She’s smart, she’s beautiful, and she seems so strong—why does she always need to be with somebody?!” But most importantly, they are played by the likes of Keke Palmer (Scorpio), Trevor Noah (Libra), Post Malone (Leo), Sofia Vergara (Cancer), Jenifer Lewis (Gemini), and Neil deGrasse Tyson (Taurus), and, as aforementioned, they are led by Jane Fonda the Sagittarius. (Congratulations to all Sagittariuses for this iconic Monster in Law representation—and apologies to Aquariuses and Capricorns, who are straight up not represented on the Cameo Council.)

If you’re otherwise not a huge Jennifer Lopez fan, the Zodiacal Council scenes are pretty much the main reason to watch This Is Me … Now . It feels like a Super Bowl commercial in that none of these people ever filmed in the same room together, the narrative structure remains extremely thin throughout, a new person pops up with each new scene (hey look, it’s Jay Shetty!), and Post Malone is there, always seeming like he’s on the verge of performatively eating a bag of Doritos.

So did Jennifer Lopez make an hour-long, $20 million music video about being a Leo?

According to everything I learned about astrology from This Is Me … Now: A Love Story —yeah, she did. Leos are confident and assertive. Leos are enthusiastic, creative, and more self-conscious than you think. Leos are, above all else, hopeless romantics (at least according to my favorite Leo, Jennifer Lopez). And not only is Jennifer Lopez a Leo … she reunited with another Leo at the end of this movie whom she will eventually fall back in love with, marry, write an album about, and create an hour-long, absolutely bonkers, beautiful, gorgeous, perfect musical movie to accompany that album about …

And in a few weeks, This Is Me … Now: A Love Story will be followed up with The Greatest Love Story Never Told , a documentary about the making of this musical movie.

To drop a documentary about the musical you created about the album you wrote about your love story that the world has been consuming for over two decades, and to then call it “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” well, I’m just gonna say it: classic Leo. Never change, Jennifer Lopez. And if you do, please make a musical about it.

But did you cry during This Is Me … Now: A Love Story ?

So kind of you to ask, and yes, of course I did. The Artist healed her own heart through the power of time and Flashdance . She learned to love herself first in order to truly love another. She went back in time and space and told her 8-year-old self that she’s sorry and she loves her. She found Ben Affleck again on a beach in front of a giant, unexplained sand statue straight out of Game of Thrones .

I’m not a monster , I’m just a Taurus.

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The biggest revelations from Jennifer Lopez's 'The Greatest Love Story Never Told’ documentary

Jennifer Lopez shared her healing and self love journey with the release of her new album, “This Is Me... Now.”

To share an additional inside look at the last 20 years of her life and rekindled romance with husband Ben Affleck , the super star also released an accompanying visual film, “This Is Me...Now: A Love Story,” and the recently released documentary “The Greatest Love Story Never Told.”

In the Amazon Prime Video documentary, out now, Lopez begins by saying that she has been married four times , candidly stating, “I’m sure people watching from the outside were like, ‘What is this f------ girl’s problem?!’”

J.Lo is currently married to Ben Affleck. She was previously married to Marc Anthony (2004–2014), Cris Judd (2001–2003) and Ojani Noa (1997–1998).

Lopez says it was the result of her “compulsive behavior” and how she pretended like everything was OK after her failed marriages.

This is just one of many biggest revelations that the “Hustlers” star shares with viewers in “The Greatest Love Story Never Told.” Read on for what we learned.

Ben Affleck gave Jennifer Lopez a book filled with letters when they got back together

Lopez and Affleck first got engaged in 2002 and planned to get married in 2004 . However, just three days before their wedding they called things off.

They eventually rekindled their relationship in 2021 and got married in 2022.

“Twenty years, I ago I fell in love with the love of my life and during that time I was making an album called 'This Is Me...Then,'" Lopez is heard telling a crowd in the documentary. "I hadn’t made an album since then. Eighteen years later, we got back together and I was very inspired.”

The inspiration also came from her “bible,” which was a book Affleck gave her on their first Christmas together.

“It is every letter and every email that we wrote to each other from 20 years ago to today,” she says, sharing that he titled it, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told by Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck 2001 to 2021... and Counting.”

Lopez placed the book in the studio and let her collaborators go through it for song inspiration — to Affleck's surprise.

Ben gets a nickname from Lopez's collaborators

Affleck appears shocked and surprised to find out that Lopez shared the book he gave her with everyone in the studio. When talking to the artists working with his wife, Affleck discovers that they gave him a nickname.

“I was like, ‘You’ve been showing all the musicians all these letters?’” Affleck says in the documentary. “And they were like, ‘Yeah, we call you Pen Affleck.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”

Ben had his reservations about Jennifer sharing their love story

Affleck recalls feeling some hesitation about Lopez being so open with their relationship in her work.

“I did really find the beauty and the poetry and the irony in the fact that it’s the greatest love story never told,” he tells the cameras. “And if you’re making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it.”

In another scene, Affleck expresses how it was an adjustment for him to have her share their private life with the world.

“Jen was really inspired by this experience, which is how artists do their work," he says. "I certainly do the same things, but things that are private, I have always felt, are sacred and special because, in part, they’re private. So this was something of an adjustment for me.”

Ultimately, Affleck comes to terms with Lopez’s project after realizing that it's not all about it.

“I don’t really love being in the making of documentary about my personal life, which is why I’m so relieved that I’m not really, it seems like I might be in this, but I’m not really,” he says. “I was worrying for no reason. The movie wasn’t about me. It was about the ability to love yourself and that love story is a lot f------ harder to find than Prince Charming.”

Ben explains the compromises he had to make when they got back together

When rekindling their relationship 20 years later, Affleck shares that compromises had to be made.

“Getting back together, I said, ‘Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media,’” he says. “Then I sort of realized it’s not a fair thing to ask. It’s sort of like you’re going to marry a boat captain and (you’re like), ‘Well, I don’t like the water.’”

He added, “We’re just two people with, kind of, different approaches trying to learn to compromise.”

Affleck is heavily featured in the documentary, sharing sweet moments with Lopez while the cameras are rolling.

Aside from his special role in "A Love Story," it's also revealed that Affleck is the one interviewing Lopez in the documentary. Her husband is behind the camera when she is doing her sit-down interviews and wearing a black long-sleeve turtleneck shirt.

Anthony Ramos turned down a role in Jennifer's project because he's friends with Marc Anthony

In the doc, Lopez reveals that the “In the Heights” star was offered the role of her significant other in the “Rebound” scene of “A Love Story.”

“He was going to do the ‘Rebound’ number with me, ‘The Glass House,’” she tells wardrobe supervisor Shawn “Beezy” Barton during rehearsals. “And he was like, ‘Ah, I’m friends with Marc.’”

Lopez was married to Marc Anthony from 2004 to 2014. The pair share 16-year-old twins Max and Emme.

The “Rebound” scene shows Lopez in an abusive relationship with a drunken partner. The singer, however, never specifically mentions who the song and scene is about.

Lopez is then seen on the phone talking to Ramos, explaining to him the meaning behind the scene.

“I didn’t know that you and Marc were, like, good friends. I didn’t know that. That’s nice,” she says. “He’s the father of my kids, obviously. I’m never going to do anything that’s going to really pinpoint him out.”

She assures Ramos that the scene “is very meta.”

“It is about, kind of, the 20-year journey between that last album and this album,” she explains over the phone. “A lot of things happened. There were a lot of relationships that I was in. That thing that you’re playing in it is representative of many relationships, not one specific relationship.”

While Ramos is not heard speaking to Lopez, she later tells Barton that he told her, “Yeah, I just think that people are going to think that... you know how the media is.’ I said, ‘But if we only did our art thinking about what the media’s going to say, what the f--- are we doing?’”

Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Jason Momoa and more were asked to appear in the film

Aside from Ramos turning down the offer to participate in “A Love Story,” the documentary reveals that Taylor Swift also said no to appearing in the film.

Jason Momoa, Jennifer Coolidge, Lizzo, Vanessa Hudgens, Ariana Grande and Snoop Dogg were also unavailable for cameos.

“I don’t want to force anybody to do this who doesn’t go, ‘This is gonna be fun,’” Lopez says, before telling her manager Benny Medina, “Nobody wants to say no to me, Benny. I get that. But when an actor doesn’t like a script, doesn’t think it’s good enough or is worried about it, that’s what they’ll say.”

Lopez also had wanted Khloe Kardashian to be a part of her project, but it didn't work out.

“People scared, scared to put themselves out there. I get it. Took me a long time,” she says. “I’m scared. I don’t act like I’m scared. That’s the secret to my whole f------ career.” 

Jennifer paid for the whole project herself

The documentary shows how Lopez had a deal to finance her film before things fell through. She didn't have anyone to finance the project, so she decided to put in $20 million of her own money.

“Making a movie with your own money is the most famous cardinal sin in Hollywood,” Affleck says in a voiceover.

Lopez’s producing partner Elaine Goldsmith Thomas explains that Lopez's decision to pay for it herself “was about investing in yourself, literally.”

Eventually, Amazon bought it for an undisclosed amount.

Jane Fonda tried to talk Jennifer out of sharing her and Ben's story

Jane Fonda, who makes a cameo in the film and documentary, advises Lopez not to share so much of her private life with Affleck.

Fonda, who co-starred with Lopez in the 2005 comedy “Monster-in-Law,” shares her concerns and tells Lopez that she feels protective over her relationship.

“I want you to know that I don’t entirely know why, but I feel invested in you and Ben, and I really, really, really want this to work,” Fonda tells Lopez over the phone. “However, this is my concern. Like, it feels too much like you’re trying to prove something instead of just living it. You know, every other photograph is the two of you kissing and the two of you hugging.”  

Lopez laughs and replies, “That’s just us living our life.”

In another confessional scene, Lopez shares how Fonda is “very protective of me and she felt like, you’re putting yourself out there to get beat up again.”

After confirming her involvement in “A Love Story,” Fonda is in the hair and makeup chair and once again tells Lopez how much she cares about her and Affleck.

“I get real scared, you know, with all that s--- about the Grammys and he looks unhappy and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, what’s happening?’” Fonda says.

Lopez replies, “Nothing! He was like, ‘I’ve become the symbol of the beleaguered man.’” Affleck would go on to poke fun at that moment in a 2024 Super Bowl ad .

Jennifer reveals she had a lack of self love

Throughout the documentary, Lopez is very candid about the heartbreak she experienced after she and Affleck called off their wedding.

“I feel like I lost the love of my life, I felt like I lost the best friend that I ever had,” she says, while also talking about her song “Broken Like Me.” “And I couldn’t talk (to him) for so many years and that was the hardest part.”

She shares during a vulnerable moment that she didn't "think much" of herself. Lopez also says that Affleck helped her love herself.

“What he says and what he saw in me, what he made me believe about myself, only comes from love, because nobody else could make me see that about myself,” Lopez says through tears. “It’s very moving. I didn’t think much of myself, and so the world didn’t think much of me.”

Liz Calvario is a Los Angeles-based reporter and editor for TODAY.com who covers entertainment, pop culture and trending news.

Jennifer Lopez to Reveal Creative Process in New Documentary ‘The Greatest Love Story Never Told’

By Emily Zemler

Emily Zemler

Jennifer Lopez will unveil a new album, This Is Me…Now , and accompanying film, This Is Me…Now: A Love Story , on Feb. 16. In addition, Amazon MGM Studios will release a documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told , that showcases how both projects came to be on Feb. 27.

Directed by Jason Bergh, the documentary “follows Jennifer Lopez as she attempts her most daring project yet: independently producing a new album and cinematic original that explore her twenty-year journey to self-love.”

The official synopsis adds that it “offers unflinching access to Jennifer’s most personal moments as she works hard to reclaim her narrative through the making of  This Is Me…Now . From interviews with her inner circle, including producing partners and longtime collaborators, to candid home moments, this is a vulnerable portrait of an icon who put it all on the line and discovered a newfound determination in self-acceptance and love.”

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This Is Me…Now: A Love Story  features an all-star cast, including Fat Joe, Trevor Noah, Kim Petras, Post Malone, Keke Palmer, Sofia Vergara, Jenifer Lewis, Jay Shetty, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sadhguru, Tony Bellissimo, Derek Hough, Trevor Jackson, Paul Raci, Bella Gagliano, Brandon Delsid, Ashley Versher, Malcolm Kelner, Alix Angelis, Danielle Larracuente, Matthew Law and Ben Affleck .

Lopez previously worked with Bergh on her film Halftime , as well as several ad campaigns. The 2022 documentary offered an inside look at Lopez’s creative process for her Super Bowl performance, as well as producing and starring in  Hustlers .

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Jennifer Lopez Will Do Anything for Love in the Dazzling Trailer for the 'This Is Me... Now' Film: Watch!

The pop superstar dropped the trailer on Wednesday for the 65-minute-long film that will arrive along with her new album on Feb. 16

Jennifer Lopez is sharing her own love story with fans — in the only dazzling way that a pop superstar can.

On Wednesday, the music icon, 54, released the cinematic trailer for her new film This Is Me… Now: A Love Story , which arrives in tandem with her highly anticipated new album and first release in a decade. 

Based on the captivating preview, it appears as though the 65-minute project set to hit streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Feb. 16 — the same day that her ninth studio album drops — finds the singer/actress on a journey through both dreamscapes and challenges grounded in reality in order to find love. 

According to a press release, Lopez created the project described as a “narrative-driven cinematic odyssey, steeped in mythological storytelling and personal healing,” along with Grammy-winning director Dave Meyers. 

Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

The official synopsis states the “Amazon original showcases her journey to love through her own eyes. With fantastical costumes, breathtaking choreography, and star-studded cameos, this panorama is an introspective retrospective of Jennifer’s resilient heart.”

The trailer offers a glimpse of that, as it shows the Grammy-nominated artist opening up her heart and facing heartbreak with different lovers in what looks like a variety of fantastical worlds. 

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

While the “Let’s Get Loud” singer’s character seemingly seeks treatment after her friends, who have seen her get married time and time again, suggest she may be a sex addict, it appears as though the “hopeless romantic” will go great lengths for love in the upcoming project. 

“I learned the hard way — not all love stories have a happy ending," Lopez says at one point in the clip. "Whenever someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, the answer was always in love."

The Golden Globe-nominated star also declares, “I know what they say about me, about hopeless romantics: That we’re weak. But I’m not weak.”

The film will also see a series of star-studded special appearances. Lopez will be joined by her husband Ben Affleck — who was famously the inspiration for her 2002 album This Is Me… Then — as well as Fat Joe , Trevor Noah , Kim Petras , Post Malone , Keke Palmer , Sofia Vergara , Jenifer Lewis , Jay Shetty , Neil deGrasse Tyson , Sadhguru, Tony Bellissimo, Derek Hough , Trevor Jackson, Paul Raci , Bella Gagliano, Brandon Delsid, Ashley Versher, Malcolm Kelner, Alix Angelis, Danielle Larracuente and Matthew Law, per a release. 

The “On the Floor” singer’s upcoming project will act as a follow-up to her 2002 hit album This Is Me… Then and comes 10 years after the release of her last full-length project, A.K.A. While the record has long been in the works, the hitmaker officially announced its release date in November 2023. 

She’s since dropped the lead single for the 13-track project: “Can’t Get Enough,” which arrived with its accompanying music video on Jan. 10.

Ahead of the visual’s premiere, Lopez addressed fans in a live stream in which she said that she connected with the track when she as hoping to find a love song that she "can perform."

"So when we first heard this song, everyone just knew that this was the one to launch This Is Me… Now ," she said. "It has an energy, it has a happiness to it, and you feel it all."

The superstar also offered a tease of the forthcoming record: “All of you have been following my journey, and I think you’ve seen me. What I wanted to tell everybody with the album... is true love actually exists."

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The biggest revelations from Jennifer Lopez's 'The Greatest Love Story Never Told’ documentary

• Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below

Jennifer Lopez shared her healing and self love journey with the release of her new album, “This Is Me... Now.”

To share an additional inside look at the last 20 years of her life and rekindled romance with husband Ben Affleck , the super star also released an accompanying visual film, “This Is Me...Now: A Love Story,” and the recently released documentary “The Greatest Love Story Never Told.”

In the Amazon Prime Video documentary, out now, Lopez begins by saying that she has been married four times , candidly stating, “I’m sure people watching from the outside were like, ‘What is this f------ girl’s problem?!’”

J.Lo is currently married to Ben Affleck. She was previously married to Marc Anthony  (2004–2014), Cris Judd (2001–2003) and Ojani Noa (1997–1998).

Lopez says it was the result of her “compulsive behavior” and how she pretended like everything was OK after her failed marriages.

This is just one of many biggest revelations that the “Hustlers” star shares with viewers in “The Greatest Love Story Never Told.” Read on for what we learned.

Ben Affleck gave Jennifer Lopez a book filled with letters when they got back together

Lopez and Affleck first got engaged in 2002 and planned to get married in 2004 . However, just three days before their wedding they called things off.

They eventually rekindled their relationship in 2021 and got married in 2022.

“Twenty years, I ago I fell in love with the love of my life and during that time I was making an album called 'This Is Me...Then,'" Lopez is heard telling a crowd in the documentary. "I hadn’t made an album since then. Eighteen years later, we got back together and I was very inspired.”

The inspiration also came from her “bible,” which was a book Affleck gave her on their first Christmas together.

“It is every letter and every email that we wrote to each other from 20 years ago to today,” she says, sharing that he titled it, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told by Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck 2001 to 2021... and Counting.”

Lopez placed the book in the studio and let her collaborators go through it for song inspiration — to Affleck's surprise.

Ben gets a nickname from Lopez's collaborators

Affleck appears shocked and surprised to find out that Lopez shared the book he gave her with everyone in the studio. When talking to the artists working with his wife, Affleck discovers that they gave him a nickname.

“I was like, ‘You’ve been showing all the musicians all these letters?’” Affleck says in the documentary. “And they were like, ‘Yeah, we call you Pen Affleck.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”

Ben had his reservations about Jennifer sharing their love story

Affleck recalls feeling some hesitation about Lopez being so open with their relationship in her work.

“I did really find the beauty and the poetry and the irony in the fact that it’s the greatest love story never told,” he tells the cameras. “And if you’re making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it.”

In another scene, Affleck expresses how it was an adjustment for him to have her share their private life with the world.

“Jen was really inspired by this experience, which is how artists do their work," he says. "I certainly do the same things, but things that are private, I have always felt, are sacred and special because, in part, they’re private. So this was something of an adjustment for me.”

Ultimately, Affleck comes to terms with Lopez’s project after realizing that it's not all about it.

“I don’t really love being in the making of documentary about my personal life, which is why I’m so relieved that I’m not really, it seems like I might be in this, but I’m not really,” he says. “I was worrying for no reason. The movie wasn’t about me. It was about the ability to love yourself and that love story is a lot f------ harder to find than Prince Charming.”

Ben explains the compromises he had to make when they got back together

When rekindling their relationship 20 years later, Affleck shares that compromises had to be made.

“Getting back together, I said, ‘Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media,’” he says. “Then I sort of realized it’s not a fair thing to ask. It’s sort of like you’re going to marry a boat captain and (you’re like), ‘Well, I don’t like the water.’”

He added, “We’re just two people with, kind of, different approaches trying to learn to compromise.”

Affleck is heavily featured in the documentary, sharing sweet moments with Lopez while the cameras are rolling.

Aside from his special role in "A Love Story," it's also revealed that Affleck is the one interviewing Lopez in the documentary. Her husband is behind the camera when she is doing her sit-down interviews and wearing a black long-sleeve turtleneck shirt.

Anthony Ramos turned down a role in Jennifer's project because he's friends with Marc Anthony

In the doc, Lopez reveals that the “In the Heights” star was offered the role of her significant other in the “Rebound” scene of “A Love Story.”

“He was going to do the ‘Rebound’ number with me, ‘The Glass House,’” she tells wardrobe supervisor Shawn “Beezy” Barton during rehearsals. “And he was like, ‘Ah, I’m friends with Marc.’”

Lopez was married to Marc Anthony from 2004 to 2014. The pair share 16-year-old twins Max and Emme.

The “Rebound” scene shows Lopez in an abusive relationship with a drunken partner. The singer, however, never specifically mentions who the song and scene is about.

Lopez is then seen on the phone talking to Ramos, explaining to him the meaning behind the scene.

“I didn’t know that you and Marc were, like, good friends. I didn’t know that. That’s nice,” she says. “He’s the father of my kids, obviously. I’m never going to do anything that’s going to really pinpoint him out.”

She assures Ramos that the scene “is very meta.”

“It is about, kind of, the 20-year journey between that last album and this album,” she explains over the phone. “A lot of things happened. There were a lot of relationships that I was in. That thing that you’re playing in it is representative of many relationships, not one specific relationship.”

While Ramos is not heard speaking to Lopez, she later tells Barton that he told her, “Yeah, I just think that people are going to think that... you know how the media is.’ I said, ‘But if we only did our art thinking about what the media’s going to say, what the f--- are we doing?’”

Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Jason Momoa and more were asked to appear in the film

Aside from Ramos turning down the offer to participate in “A Love Story,” the documentary reveals that Taylor Swift also said no to appearing in the film.

Jason Momoa, Jennifer Coolidge, Lizzo, Vanessa Hudgens, Ariana Grande and Snoop Dogg were also unavailable for cameos.

“I don’t want to force anybody to do this who doesn’t go, ‘This is gonna be fun,’” Lopez says, before telling her manager Benny Medina, “Nobody wants to say no to me, Benny. I get that. But when an actor doesn’t like a script, doesn’t think it’s good enough or is worried about it, that’s what they’ll say.”

Lopez also had wanted Khloe Kardashian to be a part of her project, but it didn't work out.

“People scared, scared to put themselves out there. I get it. Took me a long time,” she says. “I’m scared. I don’t act like I’m scared. That’s the secret to my whole f------ career.”

Jennifer paid for the whole project herself

The documentary shows how Lopez had a deal to finance her film before things fell through. She didn't have anyone to finance the project, so she decided to put in $20 million of her own money.

“Making a movie with your own money is the most famous cardinal sin in Hollywood,” Affleck says in a voiceover.

Lopez’s producing partner Elaine Goldsmith Thomas explains that Lopez's decision to pay for it herself “was about investing in yourself, literally.”

Eventually, Amazon bought it for an undisclosed amount.

Jane Fonda tried to talk Jennifer out of sharing her and Ben's story

Jane Fonda, who makes a cameo in the film and documentary, advises Lopez not to share so much of her private life with Affleck.

Fonda, who co-starred with Lopez in the 2005 comedy “Monster-in-Law,” shares her concerns and tells Lopez that she feels protective over her relationship.

“I want you to know that I don’t entirely know why, but I feel invested in you and Ben, and I really, really, really want this to work,” Fonda tells Lopez over the phone. “However, this is my concern. Like, it feels too much like you’re trying to prove something instead of just living it. You know, every other photograph is the two of you kissing and the two of you hugging.”

Lopez laughs and replies, “That’s just us living our life.”

In another confessional scene, Lopez shares how Fonda is “very protective of me and she felt like, you’re putting yourself out there to get beat up again.”

After confirming her involvement in “A Love Story,” Fonda is in the hair and makeup chair and once again tells Lopez how much she cares about her and Affleck.

“I get real scared, you know, with all that s--- about the Grammys and he looks unhappy and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, what’s happening?’” Fonda says.

Lopez replies, “Nothing! He was like, ‘I’ve become the symbol of the beleaguered man.’” Affleck would go on to poke fun at that moment in a 2024 Super Bowl ad .

Jennifer reveals she had a lack of self love

Throughout the documentary, Lopez is very candid about the heartbreak she experienced after she and Affleck called off their wedding.

“I feel like I lost the love of my life, I felt like I lost the best friend that I ever had,” she says, while also talking about her song “Broken Like Me.” “And I couldn’t talk (to him) for so many years and that was the hardest part.”

She shares during a vulnerable moment that she didn't "think much" of herself. Lopez also says that Affleck helped her love herself.

“What he says and what he saw in me, what he made me believe about myself, only comes from love, because nobody else could make me see that about myself,” Lopez says through tears. “It’s very moving. I didn’t think much of myself, and so the world didn’t think much of me.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com

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Jennifer Lopez opens up about her fitness journey: How she prepares for new album

She previously admitted that fitness was not as important for her as it is now, however she had to make some adjustments..

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Jennifer Lopez is opening up about her fitness journey, revealing that she likes to challenge herself and change things around when it comes to her workout routine. The 53-year-old actress is known for always being active, rehearsing her incredible choreographies and keeping a healthy lifestyle amid her busy schedule.

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During a recent interview with Us Weekly, the actress and performer talked about her recent collaboration with BODYARMOR, explaining how she manages to incorporate fitness into her life.

“It’s no secret that fitness is a very important part of my life,”she said. “I think there’s a positive correlation between exercise and mental health. When you find a good balance through determination and focus, we’re naturally pushing to be the best version of ourselves.”

Jennifer revealed to the publication how important it is for her to start her days with a workout, explaining that she likes to do it “first thing in the morning.” The singer says she is all about making “good choices” and balancing her time, making exercise a “motivating factor.”

“I’m always evolving and looking for things that keep me excited and motivated,” she shared, revealing how she is preparing for her upcoming album This Is Me Now. “I’m not afraid to challenge myself, so I’m open to pushing myself, which is what I’m doing right now as I rehearse for my new album, coming out this summer.”

She previously admitted that fitness was not as important for her as it is now, however she had to make some adjustments after experiencing burnout and stress. “There was a time in my life where I used to sleep 3 to 5 hours a night. I’d be on set all day and in the studio all night and doing junkets and filming videos on the weekends. I was in my late 20s and I thought I was invincible.”

“Until one day, I was sitting in a trailer, and all the work and the stress it brought with it, coupled with not enough sleep to recuperate mentally, caught up with me,” Jennifer concluded.

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Atlas: Jennifer Lopez Stars in Netflix’s Futuristic Thriller

N etflix’s upcoming sci-fi film Atlas, starring Jennifer Lopez, releases a new trailer. This give insights into the movie, set to premiere on May 24, reveals more about the thrilling journey ahead.

The trailer showcases not only Lopez but also co-stars like Simu Liu, known for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Sterling K. Brown from This Is Us.

The story introduces a seemingly perfect future with floating cities and sleek designs. However, this world hides a troubled past. Lopez’s character, Atlas Shepherd, a data analyst and government agent, is on a mission to track down rogue AI, Harlan.

What do we know?

Despite her distrust for non-human intelligence, a mission mishap leads her to form an unexpected bond with her computer program, Smith. Together, they pursue Harlan, forcing Atlas to confront her feelings.

Joining the cast are Lana Parrilla, Mark Strong, Abraham Popoola, and Gregory James Cohan. Directed by Brad Peyton, known for action-packed films like San Andreas and Rampage, Atlas promises high-octane excitement.

This film continues Netflix’s successful collaboration with Lopez, following their previous hits, The Mother and Jennifer Lopez: Halftime.

Netflix’s 2024 lineup is packed with exciting titles. After starting the year strong with acclaimed films like Society of the Snow and The Kitchen, the streaming giant continues to deliver.

Alongside Atlas, viewers can anticipate other releases like Hit Man, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, and The Union. Don’t miss out on the action-packed world of Atlas. Check out the trailer below and mark your calendars for May 24!

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Does 'atlas' have a release date, will 'atlas' be in theaters or streaming, is there a trailer for 'atlas', what is 'atlas' about, who stars in 'atlas', who is making 'atlas', when and where did 'atlas' film.

In 2021, mega-streaming platform Netflix announced that it was signing on to a multi-year first-look deal with actress and singer Jennifer Lopez and her company, Nuyorican Productions. Their first film, The Mother , was released in 2023 and told the story of an assassin (Lopez) whose sole mission is to protect her daughter. The film was an instant hit, breaking streaming records and proving that the Netflix/Lopez combination was a success.

Now, Lopez's newest Netflix film, Atlas , is taking center stage, bringing audiences a sci-fi adventure with a superstar cast. Dealing with the ever-growing conversation around Artificial Intelligence, Atlas is another action-packed role for Lopez, who plays the titular character. For all the answers to the big questions about Atlas , check out the information below.

Atlas (2024)

Atlas premieres on Netflix on May 24, 2024. This marks almost exactly a year since The Mother premiered on the streaming service. Atlas will be joining an exciting slate of titles coming to Netflix in May, including Bridgerton Season 3 Part 1 and Unfrosted .

A Netflix production, Atlas will only be available to stream through the platform. Netflix's summer movie slate also includes Hit Man , Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F , and The Union .

Subscriptions for Netflix start at $6.99 per month and go to $22.99 per month depending on your plan.

In March, a teaser trailer for Atlas gave us a taste of what to expect from Lopez, Liu, and the rest of the Sci-Fi cast. We see Jennifer Lopez's character, Atlas, as she crash-lands in an unfamiliar location. The teaser also shows Simu Liu's character, Harlan, as he appears invincible walking through a fiery landscape. While not much about the plot was revealed within the teaser, we get to see Lopez in action, as her character fights for survival.

Less than a day after its release, the full-length trailer for Atlas racked up an impressive 3.5 million views, and for good reason. The sneak peek isn't shy about its incredible cast and high production value. In the preview, we meet Atlas as she enters into her new role of hunting down a robot who may be able to help her save the world.

Atlas tells the story of Atlas Shepard (Lopez), a data analyst who deeply mistrusts artificial intelligence (AI), even though her father is responsible for ushering in this new era of technology. Not only does Atlas dislike AI, but she is also a bit of a recluse, living a solitary and private life. Atlas decides to join an anti-terrorist mission to capture a rebellious robot who just happens to be her AI "brother" named Harlan ( Simu Liu ). Atlas' mother created Harlan to protect humanity, but instead, the robot turned against its mission, launching a military attack against humans. Atlas teams up with Colonel Banks ( Sterling K. Brown ) to stop Harlan, but when things don't go as planned, Atlas must work together with an AI named Smith ( Gregory James Cohan ) in order to save humankind.

In a recent interview with Netflix, director Brad Peyton said,

"The heart of Atlas is really about trust and how difficult it is to trust people. Atlas is told through the lens of a woman who’s learning to trust after undergoing a trauma that’s upended her life. It’s a reminder of how we have to have deep, meaningful relationships in our lives, in one way, shape, or form. That you can’t do everything by yourself; you have to choose to trust people at a certain point and let them in.”

The official plot synopsis reads:

Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence, joins a mission to capture a renegade robot with whom she shares a mysterious past. But when plans go awry, her only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it.

Jennifer Lopez isn't the only big name on the cast list of Atlas , as she has some very talented and recognizable co-stars, including Simu Liu, Sterling K. Brown, Gregory James Cohan, and Mark Strong .

Playing one of the villains of the film is Simu Liu, who is most known for playing the title role in the Marvel superhero blockbuster Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings . Liu also had a supporting role in Greta Gerwig 's Oscar-winning comedy Barbie , where he played one of the many hilarious versions of Ken. Liu's other credits include shows like Kim's Convenience , Fresh Off the Boat , Awkwafina is Nora From Queens , and The Simpsons .

Academy Award nominee Sterling K. Brown was most recently in the Academy Award-winning satire American Fiction alongside Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross . His other credits include Black Panther , Frozen II , and the hit NBC drama This is Us , where he played Randall Peterson in all six seasons of the show.

Mark Strong has an incredible acting resume, including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy , Zero Dark Thirty , 1917 , The Imitation Game , Tár , and Cruella , to name a few. Strong also plays Merlin in the Kingsman films.

Voicing the AI that Atlas is forced to work with is actor Gregory James Cohan, a prolific television actor whose credits include guest-starring roles in Bull , Dynasty , Blue Bloods , NCIS: Los Angeles , Snowfall , and American Horror Stories .

Also starring in Atlas are Abraham Popoola ( Andor ), Lana Parilla ( Once Upon a Time ), Briella Guiza ( Ambulance ), Adia Smith-Eriksson ( Barry ), and Logan Hunt ( Bumblebee ).

Directing the film is Brad Peyton , a filmmaker who is no stranger to larger-than-life action films such as San Andreas and Rampage .

Atlas is a collaboration between ASAP Entertainment, Safehouse Pictures, Nuyorican Productions, and Berlanti-Schechter Films. The film is executive produced by Michael Riley McGrath ( Red, White & Royal Blue ), Samson Mucke ( The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent ), and Bergen Swanson ( Widows ).

Additional producers include Lopez, Peyton, Greg Berlanti ( Love, Simon ), Jeffrey Fierson ( Rampage ), Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas ( Hustlers ), Joby Harold ( Obi-Wan Kenobi ), Benny Medina ( The Mother ), Sarah Schechter ( Free Guy ), and Tory Tunnell ( King Arthur: Legend of the Sword ).

The film is written by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite ( The Spiderwick Chronicles ). Composing the score for Atlas is Andrew Lockington , a musician who is a master at writing for big action films. His previous credits include San Andreas , Rampage , and The Space Between Us . Atlas 's cinematographer is another master of larger-than-life cinema, John Schwartzman . Schwartzman's previous credits include blockbuster action fare such as Jurassic World , The Amazing Spider-Man , and Armageddon .

Atlas began filming in August 2022, wrapping three months later in November 2022. Filming took place in both Los Angeles and New Zealand. The California locations include the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura.

Jennifer Lopez is forced to team up with a snarky AI bot to defeat Shang-Chi star Simu Liu in the wild trailer for Netflix’s latest sci-fi action romp

Atlas hits Netflix on May 24

Following the viral trailer for Jennifer Lopez's absolutely wild autobiographical musical movie , another unhinged trailer has hit the net. This time, it's a new teaser for J-Lo's upcoming sci-fi movie Atlas – and, uh, we'll be seated.

In the brief clip, which can be viewed above, Shang-Chi star Simu Liu is an evil Terminator-esque AI (think Cyberdyne Systems) who is hell-bent on destroying the world – that only J-Lo knows how to defeat.

Per the official synopsis, the film stars Lopez as Atlas Shepherd, a "brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence who joins a mission to capture a renegade robot with whom she shares a mysterious past. But when plans go awry, her only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it."

Brad Peyton (Rampage, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) directs from a screenplay penned by Leo Sardarian (StartUp) and Aron Eli Coleite (Daybreak, Heroes). The cast includes Sterling K. Brown, Mark Strong, Abraham Popoola, and Lana Parilla. The film is produced under Lopez's Nuyorican Productions banner, which also put out Prime Video's This Is Me...Now: A Love Story. Lopez is also set to produce and star in Kiss of the Spider-Woman, a reboot of the 1985 musical drama movie, as well as that untitled Bob the Builder movie .

Atlas hits Netflix on May 24. For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies in 2024 and beyond, or, check out our list of the best Netflix movies to add to your streaming queue.

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Lauren Milici is a Senior Entertainment Writer for GamesRadar+ currently based in the Midwest. She previously reported on breaking news for The Independent's Indy100 and created TV and film listicles for Ranker. Her work has been published in Fandom, Nerdist, Paste Magazine, Vulture, PopSugar, Fangoria, and more.

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Jennifer Lopez just wore the most baggy jeans of all time

The singer and wife of ben affleck just proved she's a member of the anti-skinny jeans club.

Jennifer Lopez 's wardrobe is as versatile as her career achievements.

The multi-hyphenate superstar truly perfects every single style of dressing, whether she's on the red carpet or demonstrating her street style prowess.

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From Hermès Birkins and sweatpants to her bodycon dress for a  "moms night out" and schooling us in styling UGG boots , her spring 2024 style game is, as always, impeccable.

In her latest transitional weather season look, she's taken fashion inspiration from, well, herself, and nodded to her 2000s R'n'B era in the baggiest pair of jeans of all time.

The Jenny From The Block singer was spotted out in New York wearing the slouchiest pair of ultra-wide jeans paired with a cream turtleneck jumper, styled with a loose French tuck. She finished off the ensemble with her trusty K Swiss trainers and a pair of chunky white-framed sunglasses.

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For a hot second this summer, we thought the controversial skinny jeans might return. But the fashion set has done a 180 spin and championed everything but  the slim-leg silhouette - wide-leg Adidas trackies, high-waisted palazzo pants, you name it. 

But for those who thought they'd escaped the return completely, don't do a celebratory lap in your wide-legs just yet - Miu Miu, Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen are just a few brands who showcased iterations of the leg-sculpting silhouette in their AW24 collections during fashion month in February...

Though we're not exactly sure which brand JLo's bolshy jeans are from, the likelihood is they're high designer and slightly  out of budget for those of us who aren't singers turned actors turned businesswomen. But thankfully for us, she's committed to one particular pair of affordable trainers - her K Swiss Classic VN Platforms which she pairs with everything from her baggy trousers to flared leggings.

Forget getting you a girl who can do both, this woman can literally do anything and everything...

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