Jennifer Lopez has been quite the busy bee recently. Of course, you may have already heard about her upcoming movie with Josh Duhamel, given she was filming it as her now-ex A-Rod made a last ditch effort to fix their relationship. However, she has another movie coming opposite Owen Wilson, Marry Me, which will star her as a pop singer who spontaneously marries a man in the audience. It feels a little like a throwback to JLo classics like The Wedding Planner or Maid in Manhattan, but it’s also going to be the first time Jennifer Lopez has sung in a film since her groundbreaking turn in Selena.
Jennifer Lopez introduced her new movie Marry Me in a clip at CinemaCon 2021 in which she spoke out about signing on with a female director again right after working with Lorene Scafaria on her 2019 movie Hustlers. She also talked about how Marry Me was a return to singing form on the big screen, noting,
It’s called Marry Me and it has a little bit of something for everyone. Music, romance, comedy, emotion. I love that I get to sing onscreen for the first time since Selena. It’s been a while. It’s just one of those movies that makes you feel good and who’s not ready for that after the last year and a half...it was so exciting to be reuniting with Owen Wilson, who I worked with before... I was thrilled to follow Hustlers by working with another female director in Kat Coiro. Ladies, keep doing it!
Marry Me itself has a very rom-com premise. We also got a first look at the movie during the Universal panel. In it, Jennifer Lopez plays a singer who is preparing to marry her beau in front of an audience when news breaks that he’s allegedly cheated on her. On the spur of the moment, she sees a man in the audience with a “Marry Me” sign and decides to marry him instead. The two are from different worlds, but they decide to see if there’s a connection there regardless and if they can make it in the limelight together over the long haul.
Honestly, the movie looks exactly like the light and fluffy fodder that made Jennifer Lopez a household name as a rom-com actress in the early aughts. Owen Wilson has also dabbled in the rom-com genre before and they seem to have that “shouldn’t work, but it works” chemistry Marry Me is going for. JLo’s good for this sort of light comedy every few years (her last was 2018’s Second Act), but I’m particularly interested in her teaming up with Owen Wilson here.
Plus, in general over the past few years, a lot of movies in this genre -- not all, but a lot -- have skipped the big screen and gone straight to platforms like Netflix. There’s been an additional push to shift some of the rom-com audience to places like Hallmark which thrive off of lower budget rom-coms, so it’s just nice to see this sort of star-powered release going to the big screen.
Marry Me isn’t out until February of 2022, just in time for Valentine’s Day, so it may be a little while before fans get to check out much from the upcoming film, but that’s not remotely all the Jennifer Lopez has on the way. She also has several other movies in the pipeline, including Shotgun Wedding (I’m sensing a theme), along with Netflix’s The Mother and more. We’ll keep you updated as she continues to add to her slate.
