Reception

The film has received generally negative reviews from critics. It has a score of 22 on Metacritic, a "generally unfavorable" score based on 30 reviews. The film has a 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 121 reviews.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said, "New Year's Eve is a dreary plod through the sands of time until finally the last grain has trickled through the hourglass of cinematic sludge. How is it possible to assemble more than two dozen stars in a movie and find nothing interesting for any of them to do?" Kimberley Jones of the Austin Chronicle said, "Mostly, New Year's Eve is appalling stuff, a poorly constructed, sentimental sham. Auld lang suck." Claudia Winkleman on the BBC One show Film 2011 said "I have found the worst film of all time, and it is called 'New Year's Eve'." Rolling Stone shared the same opinion and gave a zero stars rating, stating "Director Garry Marshall follows last year's Valentine's Day romcom crapfest with an even more puke-up-able sample of the species" and concluding New Year's Eve is "bad beyond belief". British newspaper The Telegraph named New Year's Eve one of the ten worst films of 2011. On the more positive side, Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman said, "New Year's Eve is dunderheaded kitsch, but it's the kind of marzipan movie that can sweetly soak up a holiday evening."

Box office

The film opened at the #1 spot at the box office with $13.0 million. It has made $34,287,000 in the United States and Canada, as well as $27,800,000 in other countries, for a worldwide total of $83,292,000.