$5.8 million in North America. Critical response On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Hitcher holds a 62% approval rating based on 37 critic reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. The consensus reads: "Its journey is never quite as revelatory as it could be, but The Hitcher stands as a white-knuckle vision of horror, bolstered by Rutger Hauer's menacing performance". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 32 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Roger Ebert awarded it no stars, arguing that the identification of the film's hero with the killer is hollow because the killer has no backstory or even a motive. Gene Siskel also gave the film zero stars, calling it "a nauseating thriller" and "a thinly veiled but more gruesome ripoff of Steven Spielberg's Duel". In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin criticized the film's lack of intensity and originality, and wrote, "Mr. Harmon, making his feature debut, displays a much surer hand for action than for character, though even some of the action footage here looks meaninglessly overblown". Variety called it "a highly unimaginative slasher ... with a script that has many holes". In his review for The Washington Post, Paul Attanasio wrote: "The script (by Eric Red) is laconic in a dull way, much Cain but hardly able. And Harmon and his cinematographer, John Seale, have shot the movie in such brown murk, you can hardly make anything out. By the end, you're willing to forgive Ryder his worst if someone would just change the light bulb". In his review for The Globe and Mail, Jay Scott described the film as a "slasher movie about gay panic, a nasty piece of homophobic angst for the age of AIDS". A rare positive review came from Newsweek magazine's Jack Kroll who called it, "an odyssey of horror and suspense that's as tightly wound as a garrote and as beautifully designed as a guillotine". Leonard Maltin awarded the film a score of 2 1/2 out of 4 stars (his most frequently used rating), criticizing the film's violence as being "genuinely grisly and unappealing" while also noting that the film wasn't without interest. While most reviewers criticized the sadistic nature of the film's violence in general and Nash's death in particular, one of the film's producers said that the film's commercial failure was because of a