The Garfield Movie saw Chris Pratt take over voicing the lasagne-loving feline in a brand-new take on the Jim Davis comic strip. While the film didn’t completely flop at the box office, it was heavily panned by critics, but that hasn’t stopped it jumping straight to the top of the Netflix U.S. movie chart on its streaming debut.
While Pratt found huge success in 2023 voicing Nintendo’s beloved Mario in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, his time in the guise of Garfield was nowhere near as successful. The film opened this May and pulled in a respectable $257 million worldwide, which was financially sound when considering the film’s reasonable $60 million budget. However, in comparison, The Super Mario Bros. Movie raked in over $1.3 billion in April 2023. Of course, the universal draw of the video game plumber has always been much more than that of the sardonic pet of Jon Arbuckle, and so it proved.
This was also true of the critical reception to the movie. Pratt’s turn in The Garfield Movie attracted only a 36% Tomatometer score, even lower than the 59% achieved by The Super Mario Bros. Movie the year before. However, in the world of Garfield, this was actually something of a result, as the cat’s two big screen outings in the 2000’s – with Bill Murray voicing the character – fared much worse: 2004’s Garfield: The Movie scored 14% and 2006 sequel Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties dropped further to 12%. So perhaps Pratt’s movie was a winner after all…sort of.
The Garfield Movie Was a Huge Hit With Audiences
Of course, it is not the critics that pay the way of any movie. Box office results are purely decided on how many people turn up to cinemas to watch, and The Garfield Movie was always going to draw a decent audience of children and their tag-along parents. While anyone hoping to find Davis’ comic strips coming to life on screen was left disappointed – as everyone agreed that this version of Garfield was very much its own thing – the film still pulled in an impressive 80% Popcornmeter score.
Once again, this was a huge improvement on the earlier movies, both of which ended around the 40% mark, and saw plenty of praise for Pratt’s vocal performance. Some were happy to hail the Guardians of the Galaxy star as a better Garfield than Mario, but at the same time conceded that the film wasn’t quite as much fun as the Nintendo movie.
Since arriving on Netflix, The Garfield Movie has continued to improve its audience score, proving once again that there continues to be a huge divide in many movie reviews when it comes to what critics look for compared to audiences. As far as the streamer is concerned, subscribers are flocking to watch the movie, and it doesn’t make much difference what they think of it afterward. Having seen off recently released Netflix originals Uglies and Rebel Ridge, Garfield can currently lord it over the rest of the chart and enjoy the attention for a little longer until the next unexpected challenger rears its head.
