In her new documentary Halftime, Jennifer Lopez calls her co-headlining Super Bowl show with Shakira the “worst idea in the world.”
Lopez’s performance preparation for the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show was the subject of a Netflix documentary that premiered last Wednesday (June 8) at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It was the first Super Bowl to include co-headliners, as well as Latina headliners.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Lopez and her music director Kim Burse debate the time restrictions that come with having two headline performers, with Lopez adding, “we have six f***ing minutes. We have 30 seconds of a song, and if we take a minute, that’s it, we’ve got five left.”
“This is the worst idea in the world to have two people do the Super Bowl,” she says. “It was the worst idea in the world.”
Lopez’s manager, Benny Medina, expressed his dissatisfaction with the choice in a separate interview with Entertainment Weekly, saying, “Typically, you have one headliner at a Super Bowl. That headliner constructs a show, and, should they choose to have other guests, that’s their choice. It was an insult to say you needed two Latinas to do the job that one artist historically has done.”
Lopez’s annoyances are addressed at the organizers, not her co-star Shakira, with whom she talks set timings in another scene.
“I know that the Super Bowl people want us to be weaved throughout the show. I haven’t had a confirmation about how many minutes I’m going to have,” Shakira says.
“They said 12 minutes. I got kind of a good confirmation that we could have an extra minute or two, so now we’re at, like, 13, 14 minutes,” says Lopez. “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’ve f***ing done.”