Critically and commercially successful on release, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Gene Hackman won the Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy Golden Globe for his performance, it went on in 2016 to be included in BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century and it was Wes Anderson’s most financially successful film until 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Critical reviews for the film on its release were mostly positive, with main praise for its story, characters, performances and overall style and sensibility, with A.O. Scott writing in The New York Times’ that in won him over as charming, and that Gene Hackman brought “quick precision and deep seriousness [that] nearly rescue[d] this movie from its own whimsy” while Roger Ebert awarded it three-and-a-half stars, praising how viewers can be ambivalent toward the story’s events, Lou Lumenick of The New York Post called it “the year’s best movie” and Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle was enthusiastic and praised the film as “like no other, an epic, depressive comedy, with lots of ironic laughs and a humane and rather sad feeling at its core”.

In 2008, The Royal Tenenbaums placed at #159 in Empire Magazine’s ranking of the greatest films ever made, it was voted one of the 100 greatest motion pictures since 2000 in a 2016 poll of international critics for the BBC and in 2015 IndieWire named Royal as Wes Anderson’s most memorable character, crediting Hackman for bringing the character beyond the director’s norm.

Today, it stands on Rotten Tomatoes at 80% and its critical consensus reads as follows: “The Royal Tenenbaums is a delightful adult comedy with many quirks and a sense of poignancy. Many critics especially praised Hackman’s performance”.