Box office Dear Evan Hansen grossed $15 million in the domestic box office and $4.1 million internationally for a total of $19.1 million. It went on to underperform with a debut of $7.5 million, finishing second behind holdover
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Rebecca Rubin of
Variety attributed the film's underperformance to poor reviews and some moviegoers' reluctance to go to theaters during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Anthony D'Alessandro of
Deadline Hollywood suggested that the film may have been more immediately profitable had it been released onto
NBCUniversal's streaming service
Peacock, but added, "when the movies don't work at the box office, they're equally lackluster on the service". It fell 66% in its second weekend, grossing $2.4 million and finishing fifth.
Critical response On
Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100 from 48 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. Many criticized the decision to have
Ben Platt (who was 27 at the time) reprise the role as 17-year-old Evan Hansen. Scott Mendelson of
Forbes lauded the film as an "engaging and entertaining passion play, strengthened by a deluge of onscreen talent and subtly directed in a way that opens up the play without calling attention to its stage-bound roots". Conversely, Valerie Complex of
Deadline Hollywood dismissed it as "inauthentic", "shallow", and "an exercise in restraint. You either want to scream at the screen or shrink down in your chair from suffering secondhand embarrassment from these characters and their actions." David Sims of
The Atlantic opined that "almost everything imaginable has gone wrong [...] and the result is a film that [is] just painful to watch". Brian Truitt of
USA Today called it inferior to other contemporary musical films releases such as filmed productions of
Hamilton and
Come from Away and the adaptation of ''
Everybody's Talking About Jamie, writing, "Dear Evan Hansen'' frustratingly falls in between, espousing the importance of empathy and connection but in a disappointing package." The performances were well-received, particularly those of Moore, Adams, Stenberg, and Dever. Platt's acting was enjoyed by Peter Debruge of
Variety, but disliked the choice to cast "actors born the previous century" as high school students. The film's handling of its source material, particularly how the Broadway version's theatrical aspects mixed in with the film format, was generally not well received. Few critics felt the transition from stage to screen was successful, including
Charles McNulty of the
Los Angeles Times who still found the stage version better. Debruge was critical of the plotting, but gave the production crew credit for at least making some adjustments to the stage show's book, if not as many as would be desired. Less favorably, Dan Rubins of
Slant Magazine and Bill Goodykoontz of
The Arizona Republic felt the film needed more emotional depth for its serious themes to resonate; Goodykoontz highlighted Dever's and Moore's characters for being "the most realistically affected by what's going on in the story". Even more negatively,
IndieWire reviewer Tina Hassannia and Katie Walsh of
Hastings Tribune felt the source material's artifice and musical genre did not work for a mainstream film about mental health, suggesting a dramedy style would have worked better. Adrian Horton of
The Guardian, referring to Platt's presentation as a teenager, and the film's treatment of mental health, stated, "The movie asks the audience to not look at two elephants in the room, and unfortunately, no amount of soaring music can relieve that heavy a burden."
Mick LaSalle of the
San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Chbosky "needed to make
Dear Evan Hansen less grandiose. He needed to pick up the pace and chop 10 minutes from the running time".
Michael Phillips of the
Chicago Tribune said about Chbosky's direction, "
Dear Evan Hansen preserves many of the selling points of its stage incarnation. But 'preserves' isn't the same as 'activates.'"
Vanity Fairs
Richard Lawson wrote the screen adaptation left the original musical's conflicting message of staying hopeful while considering Evan's hope unwarranted. He proposed that it should have really focused on "the false cheer and heavily synthetic inspiration content of so much contemporary online life". He also found Platt's stagey acting, specifically his "highly articulated tics", unsuitable for the film format. Issues of dissonance of tone were also noticed by Michael Rechtshaffen in his otherwise positive review for
The Hollywood Reporter. He wrote that the non-musical scenes especially "struggle to find an agreeable balance between the theatrical and the melodramatic". Some reviewers took issue with the film's handling of themes related to trauma. Mendelson felt it was unsuccessful at addressing the problem. Nate Jones of
Vulture labeled it "distressing, messy, full of psychological manipulation and passive aggression", and Jeannette Catsoulis of
The New York Times lamented that it "turns villain into victim and grief into an exploitable vulnerability". David Crow of
Den of Geek bashed the film as only "paying lip-service to trauma and the lonely for its own benefit", calling it more uncomfortable than watching the
2019 film adaptation of
Cats.
/Films Josh Spiegel also panned the social issues portrayed as stuck in the early 2010s, which were "untimely", "ungainly", and "excruciatingly awkward" around the time of the film's release. In 2024,
Collider ranked it number 5 on its list of the "10 Worst Movie Musicals of All Time," writing that the film "strips away nearly everything that made the original so successful, removing its stage-dependent visual style and bafflingly recasting Ben Platt to play Evan Hansen despite him being over 25 years old. This jarring switch in mediums only made the issues with the film's story that much more egregious, managing to annoy both fans of the musical and those unfamiliar with the original musical." The film's portrayal of Evan Hansen was also included on
CinemaBlends list of "32 Main Characters That Are The Worst Part Of Their Own Movies."
Audience response Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale, while those at
PostTrak gave it a 78% positive score, with 57% saying they would definitely recommend it. Relish Mix, a company that tracks reactions on social media, rated the online response to the film at 5.5 out of 10, and said there were a wide range of conversations: "from joyous praise of the power of the theme coming from the Broadway play as a post-pandemic story of hope and inspiration" to less positive remarks which were critical of the casting of 27-year-old Ben Platt as a high school student. Steven Levenson said that he believed in the "value of criticism", but characterized critiques of Platt's casting as "cruel". In an interview with
Zach Sang, Ben Platt responded to accusations of
nepotism as his father
Marc Platt had produced the film, saying "I think the reaction is largely from people who don't understand the context of the piece – the fact that I created the role and workshopped it for three years ... Were I not to do the movie, it probably wouldn't get made ... Of course, that's not true entirely ... All I have to do is let the work speak for itself."
Internet memes Two scenes from the film, both featuring the character of Evan Hansen, went on to quickly become
internet memes right when the film became available digitally, mainly as a result of the public backlash against Platt's casting. These two moments include a close-up of Evan crying during the climax of "Words Fail", his expression wrenched and tortured, and the moment Evan runs off from Zoe Murphy in the hallways during their first meeting at school. Jameson Rich of
The New York Times observed "The image of a crying Platt is already a much-iterated joke, and its thrust is, overwhelmingly, derisive. (On Broadway,
Dear Evan Hansen balanced on a thin line between tragic morality play and light coming-of-age story, but the adaptation is a tonal pileup — "A Very Special Episode: The Musical: The Movie.") But being the target of the internet's scorn is not de facto a bad thing. When a meme circulates far enough, the underlying movie can gain what feels like cultural currency. The very fact that the images are not part of any intentional advertising actually lends them a note of authenticity. They are, in a perverse way, resonating on their own merit. Is there a better form of contemporary publicity?"
Accolades • — Also for
The Woman in the Window. ==References==