Jennifer Lopez has called her Super Bowl co-headline show with Shakira the “worst idea in the world” in her new documentary Halftime.
Netflix’s upcoming documentary premiered at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival last Wednesday (June 8), centering on the build-up to Lopez’s performance for the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show. It was the first Super Bowl to have co-headliners, and the headlining artists were Latina.
According to Entertainment Weekly, there’s a scene where Lopez and her music manager Kim Burse discuss the time constraints facing two headlining acts, with Lopez saying, “we’ve got six fucking minutes. We have 30 seconds of a song, and if we take a minute, that’s it, we have five left.
“It’s the worst idea in the world to have two people for the Super Bowl,” she said. “It was the worst idea in the world.”
According to Entertainment Weekly, Lopez’s manager, Benny Medina, also expressed his frustration with the decision in a separate interview, saying, “Usually you have a Super Bowl headliner. This headliner is building a show, and if they choose to have other guests, that’s their choice. It was an insult to say that you needed two Latinas to do the work that an artist did historically.
Lopez’s frustrations are directed at the organizers rather than her counterpart Shakira, with whom she discusses the set schedules in another scene.
I know the Super Bowl people want us to be woven throughout the show. I haven’t had confirmation on how many minutes I’m going to have,” Shakira said.
“They said 12 minutes. I had kind of a good confirmation that we might have a minute or two more, so now we’re at, like, 13, 14 minutes,” Lopez says. “I think, Shakira, what we should have is you should have half the time and I should [have half].”
“If it was going to be a double headliner, they should have given us 20 minutes. That’s what they should have done.
Despite their grievances, the pair’s performance was well received, blasting through 20 songs in their 12-minute set. Shakira performed “She Wolf”, “Empire”, “Hips Don’t Lie”, a cover of “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin and a cover of “I Like It with Bad Bunny” by Cardi B, while the performance of Lopez included a rendition by Bruce Springsteen. ‘Born In The USA’ with his daughter.
The trailer for Halftime arrived last month, in which the singer and actress discussed not being nominated for an Oscar for her role in the movie Hustlers.
“It was hard. I just had very low self-esteem. I really had to figure out who I was and believe in that, and not believe in anything else,” she said.