The Hottie and the Nottie

Opening on February 8, 2008, The Hottie and the Nottie grossed $9,000 on opening day,[3] and it went on to earn $27,696 on its opening weekend, each theater averaging $249.[4] The Houston Chronicle determined that, based on average ticket prices, this represented an average of 35 people per theatre on its opening weekend, or an average of five per showing.[5] In the end, the film grossed $1,596,232 worldwide,[6] making the film a gigantic financial disaster.

For its release in the United Kingdom, the film was advertised as "The Number One Film", with small print revealing its being number 1 on the Internet Movie Database's Bottom 100. The film opened at number 32 and grossed $34,231 in 28 theaters in the UK.

The U.K. failure of the movie along with the U.S. failure of Doogal led to its UK distributor of the movie Pathé giving up UK distribution rights in 2009 and having Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox distribute Pathe's films theatrically in the UK, after both the American failure of Doogal and the British failure of The Hottie and the Nottie, with two of their films Chatroom and Dead Man Running being transferred to the now defunct Revolver Entertainment and The Illusionist in 2010 being their last standalone distributor film to date.

The film received near-universally negative reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 6% based on reviews from 67 critics. The site's consensus states: "The Hottie and the Nottie is a crass, predictable, and ineptly staged gross-out comedy that serves little purpose beyond existing as another monument to Paris Hilton's vanity."[7] On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 7 out of 100, based on 18 reviews—indicating "overwhelming dislike".[8]

IGN gave it a zero-star review, noting that the film "presents a problem because there are just no words to adequately express how clumsy, trite and deeply offensive it is from start to finish." Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers gave the film a half-star rating, saying that the half-star was because "it takes guts (or gross dim-wittedness) [for Hilton] to appear on screen again after House of Wax."[9] Nathan Lee of The Village Voice called it "crass, shrill, disingenuous, tawdry, mean-spirited, vulgar, idiotic, boring, slapdash, half-assed, and very, very unfunny."[10] Online film critic James Berardinelli described the film's comedy as "about as funny as the anal rape scene in The War Zone".[11] Richard Roeper called the film "excruciatingly, painfully, horribly, terribly awful," and argued that "nobody in this movie really should have a career in movies". BBC reviewer Mark Kermode called it "a fascist eugenic tract...it's disgusting". Connie Ogle in the Miami Herald described The Hottie and the Nottie thus: "Imagine the worst movie you've ever seen. Got it? Now try to think of something worse. That something is this movie – wretched, embarrassing and a waste of the time and energy of everyone involved."[7] The British newspaper The People, reviewing The Hottie and the Nottie, called the film "the worst movie ever made".[12]

John Anderson of Newsday, while panning the film, was one of a handful of critics to see merit in it. He gave the film two out of four stars and concluded that "The Hottie and the Nottie is no worse in many ways than a lot of teen-centric comedies, which generally appeal to their audience through cruelty and vulgarity."

The film featured on several worst of 2008 lists, including that of The Times,[13] New York Post,[14] The Star-Ledger,[15] The Tart,[16] and Metromix.[17] In 2018 British critic Mark Kermode included the film on his list of the ten worst films of the past ten years.[18]