The film's success also led Morgan Creek Productions to produce the 1995 sequel Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls with Carrey reprising his role. Author Victoria Flanagan wrote that Carrey's performance "generated cult success for the film among adolescent male viewers". The Hollywood Reporter wrote that it "gained a loyal cult following through frequent TV airings". NME wrote in retrospect that the film was a "cult 1990s comedy". Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was released on VHS on June 14, 1994, DVD on August 26, 1997, and Blu-ray on September 3, 2013 by Warner Home Video. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released the film on Blu-ray for the 25th Anniversary Edition in April 2019. Critical reception The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that "not many critics have been charmed by Ace Ventura's exploits, and several have charged that the film's humor is mean-spirited, needlessly raunchy and homophobic". A biography on Carrey wrote that "the fans loved him and the critics hated him". Ace Ventura: Pet Detective received "generally unfavorable" reviews from contemporary critics, according to review aggregator Metacritic, which assessed 14 reviews and categorized six as negative, five as positive, and three as mixed. It gave the film an overall score of 37 out of 100. The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes assessed a sample of 62 contemporary and retrospective reviews as positive or negative and said 48% of the critics gave positive reviews with an average rating of 5/10. In 2019, Rotten Tomatoes wrote of the consensus: "Jim Carrey's twitchy antics and gross-out humor are on full, bombastic display in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which is great news for fans of his particular brand of comedy but likely unsatisfying for anyone else". Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film 1 out of 4 stars and said that he found the film as long and unfunny through an impenetrable plot. Ebert described the lead role: "Carrey plays Ace as if he's being clocked on an Energy-O-Meter, and paid by the calories expended. He's a hyper goon who likes to screw his mouth into strange shapes while playing variations on the language". Steve Gaydos of Variety praised Carrey's "ceaseless energy and peculiar talents" but reported that the "film sputters and eventually slows to a trot due to the script's inability to give Carrey anything more than a free rein to mug and strut, and a third-act payoff that takes