It’s officially April which means that we can say that three years ago this month Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got back together which also means that Bennifer 2.0 has officially outlasted OG Bennifer by a year. 

 

The first time around it was from 2002 to 2004. This time started in April of 2021 to the present and beyond. In 2024, we find Bennifer in New York City (a few days ago) seen having lunch with Matt Damon….

 

…and also supposedly checking out townhouses, leading to speculation that they’re in the market to buy. All of this while TikTok continues to be a place for JLo hate. If you haven’t seen it and you’re about to go looking, it won’t be hard to find. For about a month now she has been one of TikTok’s biggest targets – they’ve been ripping into her hard over there, accusing her of not being Bronx enough and also getting pissed at her, or her team, for issuing copyright notices to people who’ve been using clips from her music videos or docuseries. Basically they’re saying she’s a fraud and they’re bombing the comment section with criticism and accusations. 

 

On hype, then, this has not been JLo’s best era. While her album experience film and the documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, did well on Prime, the album itself, This Is Me… Now, has been a flop. But as we’ve seen from JLo, time and again, she doesn’t look back, and she can bounce. Few celebrities at her level can recover from setbacks and move on, ostensibly unbothered, the way she can. 

There’s a new movie coming out in May. And also, she and Ben may have been in New York looking for places to live because she’s in pre-production on Bill Condon’s film adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman with filming set to start imminently. JLo has always talked about her affinity for musicals so she’s realising a lifelong dream: she is finally starring in a movie musical. 

 

Kiss of the Spider Woman was originally a book by Manuel Puig and adapted for screen in the 80s with William Hurt and Raul Julia in the starring roles. It was nominated for multiple Oscars, critically acclaimed in its time, and William eventually won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Molina, the first actor to win an Oscar for playing an openly queer character, though he himself was not queer in real life. Those were different times, and the conversations about who should be taking on these parts has changed. At the time, though, it was considered radical. And now, with a brand new adaptation, the filmmakers are looking for an unknown actor who “presents as an openly queer and effeminate gay man, but may be on the non-binary/trans femme spectrum” to play Molina. 

JLo will be Aurora, the Spider Woman who is a figment of Molina’s imagination but also, perhaps, an extension of his own identity. This project, then, has the potential to be a groundbreaking work, so again JLo is onto the next.