With Netflix’s Atlas Coming Soon, Jennifer Lopez Should Stick to Genre Movies, It Suits Her
Last week, the trailer for Netflix’s science fiction thriller Atlas hit the internet. The film stars Jennifer Lopez as a data analyst with a massive distrust of artificial intelligence whose mission to capture a renegade robot does not go as planned. We know very little about it from the trailer, but the visual effects look fairly enticing, and Jennifer Lopez seems highly invested in the material, just based on the one hundred and eight seconds we can see in the teaser.
JLo has a diverse resume in show business. She’s a recording artist and businesswoman with multiple brands she is affiliated with, and she is known to be a leading lady in countless movies, specifically rom-coms and/or dramas. So, have you ever noticed that she thrives really well in genre movies?
Lopez became a star in the mid-1990s in the biopic, Selena about the famous Tejano music star Selene Quintanilla-Perez. From there, other roles came her way. But once in a blue moon, Lopez would take on roles in horror and science fiction, and the films she chose to be in oftentimes got overlooked.
1997’s Anaconda is laughed at by many, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from finding sheer enjoyment in watching Lopez and Ice Cube battle an evil Jon Voight and a giant Anaconda in the Amazon jungle. It’s one of the perfect horror/animal attack movies there is and a major key player in the boom of films of the same sort of feel and subgenre in the late 1990s.
Anaconda may not be something JLo has acknowledged a lot throughout her career, but it’s there, and a lot of fans love it. It’s the first of a few fine examples as to why she should continue to stick with more obscure and abstract sorts of films in different kinds of genres.
Did somebody say abstract? 2000’s The Cell is a film that many JLo fans overlook, but genre movie fans have welcomed it into their collection of favorite mind-bending, dark thrillers. In the film, Lopez plays an FBI agent who, through transcendental science, must go into the mind of the killer to uncover the answer as to where his most recent kidnapped victim may have been hidden.
The Cell has out-of-this-world visuals that seem complex to the average viewer, but it’s worth a watch if you are a Lopez filmography completist. Unfortunately, the 2000s gave JLo opportunities that had her shift away from horror and science fiction while still playing leads in films like Angel Eyes and Enough.
These were thrillers that fell flat at the box office. Lopez’s music career was going up and up during this time. It was not until we got to 2015 that she starred in the Blumhouse-produced The Boy Next Door. A schlocky sexual thriller about a woman who sleeps with a younger man only to learn that the eighteen-year-old is a little psycho. It’s a Lifetime movie turned up to 100 in terms of how it is presented.
All of this being said, to get to this point, Netflix now has Atlas, a big-budget-looking sci-fi feature with JLo in the lead. Some internet banterers think it is an annoyance to see her in a movie like this. However, Lopez, in the few genre films she’s acted in, has done quite well, held her own, and played her role like she respected the material she was working with.
We know very little about Atlas, but it feels like a direct-to-streaming blockbuster, which sounds like a misfire, but there’s a possibility for it to be a hit. This could be a new chapter, with Lopez doing sci-fi and maybe even blending it back into horror down the road.
We’ve seen many multi-talented actors and actresses over the years take swings in their second act in something different. The idea of Jennifer Lopez doing these kinds of films rather than rom-coms has always been there; it suits her, and it’s time to explore it more.
Watch Atlas on Netflix on May 24, 2024.
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What do you think of Jennifer Lopez’s acting career? Will you be watching Atlas? Is it worth the hype? Let us know in the comments below.