20th Century Fox released the film theatrically in the United States on March 19, 2010, receiving mixed reviews from critics and grossing $76 million worldwide against a $15 million budget.
Preteen Greg Heffley illustrates his daily life in a diary. He says he is writing in one for when he is "rich and famous", but is in middle school for now. Greg lives with his parents, Susan and Frank, his younger brother, Manny, and his older brother, Rodrick, who picks on Greg. On Greg’s first day of middle school, he quickly discovers the ups and downs, such as the missing stall doors in the boys' bathroom and the difficulties of obtaining a seat during lunch. During physical education, Greg and his best friend, Rowley Jefferson, escape from a game of Gladiator and meet Angie Steadman, a seventh-grader who isolates herself from the other students to "survive". They also notice a moldy piece of cheese on the basketball court. When Greg almost touches it, their friend, Chirag Gupta, tells them that whoever touches it gets “The Cheese Touch”, where they become a social outcast due to everyone being disgusted by that person because they touched the cheese, and that the only way to get rid of “The Cheese Touch” is to pass it on to someone else by touching them. Greg states his intention of becoming the most popular student in school, as well as earning a place in the school yearbook as a class favorite, only for several of his attempts to fail.
On Halloween, when Greg and Rowley go out trick-or-treating, a group of teenage boys drive by in a pickup truck, and spray a fire extinguisher at them. When Greg threatens to call the police, the boys chase him and Rowley to Greg's grandmother's house, but the latter two escape them after Greg accidentally damages their truck with a weed eater.
The boys join the Safety Patrol team at school in another effort to become popular and try out for a contest that offers a student a chance to become the cartoonist for the school paper. When Greg accidentally breaks Rowley's arm, during a dangerous game the duo invented, Rowley becomes extremely popular and wins the cartoonist contest, making Greg envious of him. During a Safety Patrol assignment, Greg walks kindergartners down a neighborhood street without Rowley, but panics when he encounters a truck identical to the teenagers' from Halloween and hides himself and the kids in a construction zone. He is then confronted by a neighbor who mistakes him for Rowley, having borrowed Rowley's coat, forcing him to abandon the kindergarteners and flee. To his bewilderment, Rowley is suspended from Safety Patrol, but Greg eventually confesses his guilt to him, foolishly offering it as a joke and saying that they could both learn "lessons" from the incident. Distraught and angered over Greg's mistreatment of him, Rowley ends their friendship. When the truth soon comes to light, Greg is fired from the service while Rowley is reinstated as captain and befriends their classmate, Collin, who replaces Greg as Rowley's best friend. Greg attempts to pursue popularity without Rowley, but those efforts also fail.
One day after school, Greg and Rowley confront each other in rage and a circle of students encourages them to fight. However, neither of them are good at fighting. The teenagers from Halloween arrive at the scene and force Rowley to eat part of the cheese after the other kids, except for Greg, are chased inside the school. They flee the scene when the school's physical education teacher, Coach Eduardo Malone, arrives, but when the other kids come back out and notice the cheese has been eaten, Greg takes the blame to save Rowley's reputation, and they reconcile. At the end of the school year, Greg and Rowley make the yearbook class favorites page as "Cutest Friends".
The mold for the Cheese was completely digital. Filmmakers left a real square of cheese outside for a few days inside a wire cage to keep animals out and sunlight in, and after this, a piece of cheese was made out of silicone and had mold effects added using CGI.[13]
The animated sequences were not 2D animated, but in fact made with 3D animation. The animated sequences were first animated in 3D, and then rendered in a rough sketch shader to make them look 2D.[13]
The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray on August 3, 2010. The Blu-ray version features six pages from Rowley's diary, Diary of an Awesome, Friendly Kid. It was released on the streaming service Disney+ on November 12, 2019; its launch date.[15]
Reception
Critical response
Review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 55% based on 106 reviews and an average rating of 5.5/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Unlike its bestselling source material, Diary of a Wimpy Kid fails to place a likable protagonist at the center of its middle-school humor – and its underlying message is drowned out as a result."[16] It also holds a rating of 56 out of 100 at Metacritic, based on 26 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[17] Audience surveyed by CinemaScore gave this film an "A-."[18]
Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, writing "It's nimble, bright and funny. It doesn't dumb down. It doesn't patronize. It knows something about human nature."[19] Glenn Whipp of the Associated Press was less positive, saying, "In transferring the clean, precise humor of Kinney's illustrations and prose to the big-screen, the material loses just a bit of its charm."[20]At the Movies host David Stratton gave the film one star while co-host Margaret Pomeranz gave it half a star. Stratton called the film "tiresome" and said there was "nothing remotely interesting in Thor Freudenthal's direction or the screenplay." Pomeranz disliked the character of Greg Heffley, saying "I really thought he was unpleasant. I did not want to spend time with him. I could not wait for the end of this film."[21]
OregonLive.com gave the film a C+ grade, criticizing it for being "too often dull, unappealing and clumsy, hobbled by unnecessary changes and inventions that add no charm, energy or, truly, point."[22]
Box office
Despite a lack of distinctive marketing, Diary of a Wimpy Kid drew a decent crowd, opening to $22.1 million on approximately 3,400 screens at 3,077 sites, in second place at the weekend box office behind Alice in Wonderland but beating out the heavily hyped The Bounty Hunter.[23] It was the biggest start ever for a non-animated, non-fantasy children's book adaptation. Diary of a Wimpy Kid grossed more in its first three days than other film adaptions to children's novels like How to Eat Fried Worms and Hoot grossed in their entire runs.[23] The film grossed $64,003,625 in North America and $11,696,873 in other territories for a worldwide total of $75,700,498.[24]
An animated reboot directed by Swinton Scott was released on Disney+ on December 3, 2021. Unlike the other films, this was the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid film to be animated fully in computer-generated imagery and features Greg and the characters in colors. Originally set as an adaptation of Cabin Fever by Kinney, it was re-announced in 2018 as an animated series but switched to a CGI movie in 2019. It stars Brady Noon, Ethan William Childress, and Chris Diamantopoulos.[26]
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