The new Garfield move came out May 24, 2024 to very, very mixed reviews. I feel as though its biggest struggles were its lack of a target audience, and the weird changes they made to the Garfield source material. However, this wouldn’t be the first time a Garfield piece of media was very openly disliked for being inaccurate or straight up bad.
In 2004, the original Garfield movie was released. A live action movie with a vile looking 3D model of Garfield, with the premise revolving around Garfield trying to prove himself as THE pet of the house when Jon tries to adopt Odie. The movie was the furthest thing from critically acclaimed, to this day having a rating around 2/5 on most movie review websites. The movie also got a sequel in 2006 that got notably less viewers and was even described by some as worse. So, movie-wise, Garfield wasn’t looking too bright to begin with.
There was also a Garfield TV show, and despite its many flaws, it can be regarded as the best piece of Garfield media due to there not really being another choice! There are many animation mistakes in episodes that to a sane person wouldn’t mean much, but there was also a time a whole 5 second segment of an episode aired completely unrendered and unfinished. (S02E18). To this day, it mostly never got fixed anywhere.
The last of the big three of Garfield media outside of the original comics were the video games. There are many small 2D Platformer Garfield games, but the one I found most notable of any game was Garfield Kart. Garfield Kart is awful. But that almost gives it charm. It has very strange controls and inputs that make it very unintentionally difficult, especially on the keyboard. It feels very similar to many other racing games, but the jankiness and look of it are loosely based off Garfield. I obtained the game for $0.45 on a Steam sale, which I think should say something about its quality. There is a sequel that’s (once again) regarded to be worse, and from experience, it doesn’t feel much different aside from having better graphics and a lot of motion blur.
If it wasn’t clear, not many were a big fan of the actual new pieces of Garfield media. The franchise only really every stays relevant through its marketability keeping it thriving. So once the movie was announced, people we’re worried.
At first, there was leaked concept art of the main characters that were 2D and actually didn’t look bad. It looked pretty accurate to the actual source material with a new coat of paint. However, once the voice actors and plot were revealed, people became worried even more.
I’m unsure of what chokehold Chris Pratt has on the movie industry, but apparently the Garfield team was a fan of his performance as Mario and decided to get him to be the voice of Garfield.
There was very little advertising for this movie until up to the week it released for some reason, but every time the public saw a trailer, they’d get more and more worried about this thing. The target audience was probably a child, since it’s an animated movie by Columbia Pictures; however, sadly, most kids now wouldn’t know what a Garfield was. It seems like appealing to older fans was an afterthought because of how much they butchered so many details.
For spoiler reasons, I won’t go into detail about what happens in the movie, but in a theatre full of all ages, not once did I genuinely hear someone laugh at one of the jokes, and I mean that sincerely. I enjoyed the idea of it, and Nicholas Hoult as Jon worked well, however there was a lot they could’ve done better. As of now, it has a 2.7 on letterbox, while the original, which again, was awful, has a 2.4.
