Box office
The Circle grossed $20.5 million in the United States and Canada and $20.1 million in other territories, for a total of $40.6 million, against a production budget of $18 million.[1]
In the United States and Canada, the film was released alongside How to Be a Latin Lover, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion and Sleight, and was projected to gross $10–12 million from 3,163 theaters during its opening weekend.[22] However, the film underperformed, debuting at number five with $9 million, behind The Fate of the Furious, How to Be a Latin Lover, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion and The Boss Baby.[23]
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 15% based on 144 reviews, with an average rating of 4.20/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The Circle assembles an impressive cast, but this digitally driven thriller spins aimlessly in its half-hearted exploration of timely themes."[24] On Metacritic, the film holds a score of 43 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews."[25] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "D+" on an A+ to F scale.[26]
Glenn Kenny of The New York Times criticized the film for its repetitiveness and lack of originality: "The novel is at its most trenchantly funny when depicting the exhausting nature of virtual social life, and it's in this area, too, that the movie gets its very few knowing laughs. But it's plain, not much more than 15 minutes in, that without the story's paranoid aspects you're left with a conceptual framework that's been lapped three times over by the likes of, say, the Joshua Cohen novel Book of Numbers or the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley."[27] Dan Callahan of TheWrap wrote: "The main problem with The Circle is that the evil of the tech company is made so obvious right from the start."[28]
Eric Kohn of IndieWire awarded the film a C. He was especially critical of the film's tonal inconsistencies: "Recent years have seen a proliferation of deep-dive narratives on the information age, from the psychological thriller territory of Mr. Robot to the parodic extremes of Silicon Valley. Ponsoldt's project is stuck in between those two extremes. On the one hand, it's an Orwellian drama about surveillance society; at the same time, it's a sincere workplace drama about young adulthood that shoehorns in some techno-babble for the sake of deepening its potential."[29]
Gregory Wakeman of Cinema Blend panned the film, arguing that "the movie's grand philosophical debate is so simplistic and comes from two opposing and extreme sides of the spectrum that it's basically rendered mute." He also wrote: "Smug, condescending, and completely without incident, The Circle is the reason why people hate Hollywood." Wakeman gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of five.[30] Likewise, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film one star out of four. He wrote: "The Circle feels dull, dated and ripped from yesterday's headlines. It flatlines while you're watching it."[31]
In a positive review, John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "The film's final message isn't as difficult to grapple with as the world we're actually living in, but that doesn't make it easy." He also described the film as "a mainstream-friendly critique of social media."[32] Owen Gleiberman of Variety was positive as well, directing much of his praise towards the film's contemporary relevance: "You could call The Circle a dystopian thriller, yet it's not the usual boilerplate sci-fi about grimly abstract oppressors lording it over everyone else. The movie is smarter and creepier than that; it's a cautionary tale for the age of social-media witch hunts and compulsive oversharing. The fascist digital future the movie imagines is darkly intriguing to contemplate, because one's main thought about it is how much of that future is already here."[33] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle also praised the film's timeliness: "What makes The Circle so valuable is not only that it's showing us a ghastly possible path that the world may take, but that it articulates the mentality that could create and sustain it."[34]
