The Ugly Truth

Abby Richter is a driven producer at a Sacramento morning television show whose high standards have left her single and convinced she is hopeless at romance. When the programme's ratings slip, her bosses pair her with Mike Chadway, a blunt new correspondent whose on-air segment claims to expose what men really want. His chauvinistic style appals Abby, yet it draws viewers, making him impossible to remove. The tension between the two is complicated further when Abby meets Colin, a charming doctor who lives in her building and seems to be everything Mike is not. Reluctant but determined to make the relationship work, Abby accepts Mike's coaching, which pushes her through a series of humiliating ordeals designed to test his theories about the sexes. The arrangement leads somewhere neither of them anticipated.

Robert Luketic directed the film, which sits between 21 and Killers in his filmography. The screenplay is by Karen McCullah and Nicole Eastman, and the cast is led by Katherine Heigl as Abby, Gerard Butler as Mike, Eric Winter as Colin, and Bree Turner and John Michael Higgins in supporting roles.

The film was released in July 2009 and cost about 38 million dollars to produce. It became a considerable commercial success, taking roughly 322 million dollars worldwide, a figure far beyond its budget. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.4 from around 241,000 votes, while on TMDB it scores 6.5 from a much smaller base of about 3,800 votes. Film critics were markedly less enthusiastic, giving it 4 out of 10 across 173 reviews, so audiences responded considerably more warmly than reviewers did.