By: Dave Astor "Garfield: The Movie" opened with a $21.7-million weekend. It also opened with more negative than positive reviews, according to an E&P search of 20 newspapers and newspaper Web sites.
The film finished fifth in box-office proceeds, behind "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," "The Chronicles of Riddick," "Shrek 2," and "The Stepford Wives."
Roger Ebert was one critic liking the movie, which features Bill Murray voicing the cat from the Universal Press Syndicate-distributed comic by Jim Davis. Ebert, of the Chicago Sun-Times and Universal, wrote in a three-star review that the film "captures the elusive charm of the most egotistical character on the funny pages and drops him into a story that allows him to bask in his character flaws. ... The filmmakers obviously understand and love Garfield, and their movie lacks that sense of smarmy slumming you sometimes get when Hollywood brings comic strips to the screen."
Michael Kleinschrodt of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans wasn't as happy with the movie. In a one-star review, he wrote: "Too little, too late. That pretty much tells audiences all they need to know about 'Garfield,' Peter Hewitt's adaptation of the comic strip whose popularity seems to have peaked in the late 1980s. ... A bare-bones plot serves mainly to fill the space between product placements. ...The movie plays out like a 30-minute television special painfully stretched to feature length."
Stephen Whitty of The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., wrote: "Every cartoon has its fans, but the idea of a lazy cat who loves lasagna wore awfully thin years ago. ... Are studios so desperate for material they're reduced to this?"
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