When "Chapter 27" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the film was debated fiercely by critics. MTV wrote that "the audience's reactions made it obvious that some people would love it and others would not." On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 18% based on 49 reviews, with an average rating of 3.9/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Despite Jared Leto's committed performance, "Chapter 27" fails to penetrate to mind of Mark David Chapman, John Lennon's killer." On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 32 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".