J-Lo cooks up a turkey

They may be Hollywood's hottest couple, but Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have suffered box office meltdown in their first film together.

Despite costing over £80million, the comedy gangster romance Gigli barely scraped past £2million in its opening weekend and looks set to be one of the biggest box office flops in recent history.

Audiences deserted the film after it was drubbed by US critics. It barely managed eighth place in the box office charts, beaten even by Disney's Finding Nemo - which has been playing since May.

The £3million British independent comedy Bend It Like Beckham, which premiered in March in the US, took twice as much.

J-Lo and her fiancé are reported to have been paid £8million each to play rival gangsters in Gigli, which now looks set to join Ishtar, Waterworld and Showgirls as a by-word for bad film-making. It was called "the
worst movie of our admittedly young century" by the Wall Street Journal, and "nearly as unwatchable as it is unpronouncable" by the Los Angeles Times.

The New York Times described the film as a "hopelessly misconceived exercise in celebrity selfworship", while the San Francisco Chronicle called it "the most thoroughly joyless and inept film of the year".

Critics flinched at the crudity of the dialogue, including an infamous "gobble, gobble" crack by Lopez when she tells Affleck to copy a turkey during a sex scene.

The couple met in 2001 during shooting for the film when Lopez was still married to second husband, Chris Judd. They became engaged four months later, after her divorce. Despite the off-stage passion between the couple, early test screenings showed a worrying lack of chemistry between the two.

Distributors have not yet decided if they will send Gigli straight to video and DVD rather than release it in Britain, as happened with Madonna and Guy Ritchie's flop Swept Away, which was pulled from the US screens after three weeks.