The audience graded it well above the critics
CinemaScore handed it a B+; the critics wrote it off. That gap is the whole story of how the film landed.
What the numbers said
When The Ugly Truth opened on 24 July 2009, CinemaScore ↗ polling stations were working the multiplex lobbies the same way they had been since the company's founding in the late 1970s: interviewers with cards, asking opening-night audiences to grade what they had just seen on a scale from A+ to F. The film came back with a B+. That is not a spectacular result — an A or A− would have signaled word-of-mouth legs, the kind that compound across multiple weekends — but a B+ is solidly positive, the grade of an audience that got what it came for and left without a grievance. Given that the critical aggregate told a different story almost entirely, the B+ matters as a record of who actually bought a ticket and why.
The critical response clustered around disappointment and formula. Reviewers working the major outlets found the film crude where it meant to be sharp, and mechanical where it meant to be charming. The aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes sat below the 15 percent mark at certain points, though figures from review aggregators shift as more reviews are filed and the precise number varies by date of retrieval. What does not shift is the structural divergence: press screenings and opening-night multiplex audiences are not watching the same film in the same frame of mind, and the gap between the two populations is one of the more reliable facts in commercial exhibition. Critics arrive with genre history loaded — the romantic comedy's lineage ↗ runs from screwball through Nora Ephron and beyond, and a reviewer who has that context active is measuring the film against His Girl Friday and When Harry Met Sally without necessarily choosing to. A Friday-night audience in Sacramento or Phoenix is measuring it against whether Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler are funny together, and whether the movie delivered what the trailer promised.
What the critics were actually arguing
It is worth being precise about what the critical objection was, because "the critics hated it" is too blunt. The more specific charge was that the film's sexual politics were retrograde — that it asked the audience to find Gerard Butler's character's worldview both boorish and ultimately correct, and that Heigl's character capitulated to it by the final act. That is a structural criticism, not a taste complaint, and it is not an unreasonable one to make. The MPAA's R rating ↗ meant the film had committed to a franker register than the PG-13 romantic comedy, which raised the stakes: raunchiness in a studio comedy is always a bet that the film can earn the license it has taken. Several reviewers concluded it could not. The Golden Raspberry Awards, which function as a kind of institutionalized critical gesture, nominated Heigl for Worst Actress, a nomination that says more about how the film was received in certain quarters than about her actual performance, which is competent work in a difficult tonal register.
John Michael Higgins and Cheryl Hines, playing a bickering local-television couple who serve as the film's comic ballast, drew warmer notices than the leads from several reviewers who noticed that the supporting material was sharper than the central throughline. That split — leads criticized, supporting players praised — is a structural signal that the screenplay's engine was working better at the edges than at the center. Nicole Eastman wrote the original script; Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith, a partnership with Legally Blonde and 10 Things I Hate About You on their record, came in on the rewrite. The three share the credit. Rewrite credits in studio comedy are common enough that the Writers Guild has precise arbitration rules governing them, but the McCullah-Smith involvement in particular carries an implied promise of a certain kind of vernacular wit, and some reviewers felt that promise was only intermittently kept.
Why the audience disagreed, and what that tells you
CinemaScore grades are a polling artifact: they measure the mood of people who chose to attend on opening night, which is the most self-selected slice of any film's eventual audience. Those people have already been sold. The trailer did its work. They arrived wanting what the marketing promised — two attractive leads in a combative setup with explicit jokes — and the film delivered that. A B+ reflects satisfaction, not enthusiasm, which is honest. It also reflects the fact that the film's actual thesis — that frankness about attraction, even when delivered by someone obnoxious, is more useful than polished performance — is something a Friday-night crowd can track and enjoy without needing to resolve its political implications before the lights come up.
Robert Luketic, directing, came to the material from Legally Blonde and Monster-in-Law, films that also divided critical and audience response along roughly similar lines. His instinct is for pace and performance rather than thematic coherence, which produces films that play well in real time and leave critics with insufficient architecture to admire. Aaron Zigman's score reinforces that function: it cues the audience when to lean in and when to relax, keeping the comedic rhythm from sagging without drawing attention to itself. A film that feels brisk while you are watching it and thin when you think about it afterward will consistently produce the CinemaScore/aggregate split that The Ugly Truth produced.
The commercial result settled the argument in the way commercial results do: the film cost approximately $38 million and grossed around $205 million worldwide ↗, a ratio that justifies every decision in the chain. Columbia Pictures had a mid-budget romantic comedy in a period — 2009 — when that budget band was still reliably profitable, and the B+ from CinemaScore was the early signal that the audience relationship was intact even as the press was filing negatives. The theatrical window was long enough in 2009 that word of mouth had time to work, and the overseas gross added a further layer of insurance. Critics shape awards campaigns and long-term reputation. CinemaScore shapes the second weekend's advertising spend. In 2009, for a film like this one, the second number was the one the studio watched first.