Box office The film debuted at #2 behind
The Expendables with $23,104,523. It had the highest debut at the box office with Roberts in a lead role since ''
America's Sweethearts in 2001. During its initial ten-day run, revenue grew to a total of $47.2 million. The competing film The Expendables'' features
Eric Roberts, Julia Roberts' brother, and the box office pitted Roberts versus Roberts.
Hollywood.com commented that "
sibling rivalry is rarely as publicly manifested" as this. The film, produced on a $60 million budget, grossed $80,574,382 in the
United States and
Canada and has a worldwide total of $204,594,016.
Critical response On
Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 34% approval rating based on 204 reviews with an average rating of 5.20/10. The site's critical consensus reads "The scenery is nice to look at, and Julia Roberts is as luminous as ever, but without the spiritual and emotional weight of the book that inspired it,
Eat Pray Love is too shallow to resonate." On
Metacritic, it has a score of 50 based on reviews from 39 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences surveyed by
CinemaScore gave the film a grade B on scale of A to F.
Peter Bradshaw of
The Guardian gave the film 1 out of 5 stars, beginning his review "Sit, watch, groan. Yawn, fidget, stretch. Eat
Snickers, pray for end of dire film about Julia Roberts' emotional growth, love the fact it can't last forever. Wince, daydream, frown. Resent script, resent acting, resent dinky tripartite structure. Grit teeth, clench fists, focus on plot. Troubled traveller Julia finds fulfilment through exotic foreign cuisine, exotic foreign religion, sex with exotic foreign Javier Bardem. Film patronises Italians, Indians, Indonesians. Julia finds spirituality, rejects rat race, gives Balinese therapist 16 grand to buy house. Balinese therapist is grateful, thankful, humble. Sigh, blink, sniff. Check watch, groan, slump." In 2025 Bradshaw retrospectively downgraded his score to zero stars, describing it as "pure moviemaking horror" and stating "I can feel myself worrying that zero is generous."
Wesley Morris of
The Boston Globe gave the film 3 out of 4 stars while writing "Is it a romantic comedy? Is it a chick flick? This is silly, since, in truth, it's neither. It's simply a Julia Roberts movie, often a lovely one."
San Francisco Chronicle film critic
Mick LaSalle overall positively reviewed the film and praised Murphy's "sensitive and tasteful direction" as it "finds way to illuminate and amplify Gilbert's thoughts and emotions, which are central to the story". Negative reviews appeared in
The Chicago Reader, in which Andrea Gronvall commented that the film is "ass-numbingly wrong", and
Rolling Stone, in which
Peter Travers referred to watching it as "being trapped with a person of privilege who won't stop with the whine whine whine." Humor website
Something Awful ran a scathing review. Martin R. "Vargo" Schneider highlighted several aspects of the film that he considered completely unrealistic. Political columnist
Maureen Dowd termed the film "
navel-gazing drivel" in October 2010. The
BBC's
Mark Kermode listed the film as 4th on his list of Worst Films of the Year, saying: "
Eat Pray Love... vomit. A film with the message that learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all, although I think the people who made that film loved themselves rather too much." In
The Huffington Post, critic
Jenna Busch wrote: In the Italian newspaper
La Repubblica, journalist
Curzio Maltese wrote: The film received generally negative reviews in the Italian press. ==Merchandising==