History YMMV / TheButterflyEffect

** The reaction of the cell-mate to the magically appearing "stigmata".

* CriticalDissonance: Critics generally hated it, but audiences were kinder and it made its money back several times over. This can be seen in the Rotten Tomatoes scores: 33% for critics versus 81% for audiences.

* VindicatedByHistory: Five years after release, Peter Bradshaw in ''The Guardian'' [[https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2009/aug/13/time-travelers-wife-butterfly-effect argued that]] the main reason for the film's critical drubbing at the time of release was because of Ashton Kutcher's public persona, and that "slowly but surely, it will float up to B-picture classic status."

* TearJerker:
** The Director's Cut ending. [[spoiler:Evan kills himself in his mother's womb, and everybody else gets a happy ending.]]
** Kayleigh furiously telling Evan about why he didn't just visit or ''call'' her after years of abuse and hell near the beginning of the movie. [[spoiler: Then she kills herself.]]
** The theatrical ending: [[spoiler: [[IWantMyBelovedToBeHappy Evan hurts Kayleigh when they were kids in order to make her and Tommy move away from their father and be with their mother, the result leading to the two (]]''[[IWantMyBelovedToBeHappy especially]]'' [[IWantMyBelovedToBeHappy Tommy) to have successful futures and happy lives all away from him]]. The fact Evan sees her walking the street one last time but not go catch up to her makes it more bittersweet, superimposed by Music/{{Oasis}}'s "Stop Crying Your Heart Out"]].

* AcceptableTargets:
** Fraternity members. In the first altered timeline, Evan winds up as a member of a stereotypical group of wealthy, womanizing frat boys who openly cheat on exams and treat their pledges like shit; it's hard to blame his former roommate, Thumper, when he refuses to even speak to him anymore.
** The Aryan Brotherhood members Evan encounters in prison are, unsurprisingly, among the most overtly villainous characters in the film.

** Kid!Tommy's constant cursing and his vulgar {{MST}}-ing on the Gluttony victim from ''Film/{{Se7en}}'' in the cinema. In the same scene, he also beats up a guy twice his size in the cinema after witnessing Evan and Kayleigh (who is his sister, by the way) kiss.

* WhatAnIdiot: The recurrent "Don't try to change the past" message is somewhat dampened by the fact that many of Evan's woes come from him making ''painfully'' stupid decisions that could easily have been avoided if he'd bothered to think them through. He doesn't consider that ''putting dynamite in a neighbor's mailbox'' might somehow go wrong; he doesn't think about the possible repercussions of [[spoiler: beating a man to death]]; he thinks that he can permanently stop an abusive pedophile by [[TheReasonYouSuckSpeech giving him a verbal beatdown]] [[NoSympathy and redirecting the creep's abuse to someone Evan knows for a fact was also affected by the creep]] ([[ItsAllAboutMe something Evan doesn't even bother correcting]] the second time he redoes that part of his life); he doesn't hesitate to hand a knife to a kid without properly explaining what the kid's supposed to do with the knife, then rendering the knife-giving worse than pointless...

* I was positively surprised when I saw Thumper: finally, a goth who's depicted in a positive light: as the friendly buddy. But then I was disappointed when I saw the real reason they'd added him to the film: He's a marker for a crapsack world. In those realities where things are shit, Evan ends up with him as a dorm mate. In those where everything's fine, he doesn't.

* FirstInstallmentWins: Well... there are two obscure direct-to-DVD sequels but [[{{Sequelitis}} don't worry about those]]

** The ending of the director's cut, where Evan goes back in time [[spoiler: to ''strangle himself in the womb as a fetus.'']] That's not tragic, that's [[RefugeInAudacity twistedly]] [[CrazyAwesome amazing.]] While his mother watches it in real-time on an ultrasound and screams [[OhNoNotAgain "Not again!".]]

* {{Narm}}: The whole film is filled with this, apart from also being a relentless DeusAngstMachina. Highlights include:
** Any time something particularly horrible happens to Evan.

* FirstInstallmentWins: Well... there are two obscure direct-to-DVD sequels.

** The ending of the director's cut, where Evan goes back in time [[spoiler: to ''strangle himself in the womb as a fetus.'']] That's not tragic, that's [[RefugeInAudacity twistedly]] [[CrazyAwesome amazing.]]