A film still featuring Farrell, Whishaw, and Reilly was released around the same time. The film's posters were designed by Vasilis Marmatakis, with the Colin Farrell one sheet version considered by professional poster designer Adrian Curry to be the 2nd best poster of the 2010s. In May 2015, Alchemy acquired United States distribution rights; however, due to the company's financial struggles at the time, A24 acquired the US rights instead. Originally scheduled for an 11 March 2016 release, it was rescheduled to 13 May 2016. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 88% based on reviews from 254 critics, with an average rating of 7.55/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "As strange as it is thrillingly ambitious, "The Lobster" is definitely an acquired taste — but for viewers with the fortitude to crack through Yorgos Lanthimos' offbeat sensibilities, it should prove a savory cinematic treat". On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 82, based on 44 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Oliver Lyttelton of "The Playlist" awarded the film an "A" grade and described it as "an atypically rich and substantial comedy" with "an uproarious yet deadpan satire concerning societal constructs, dating mores and power structures that also manages to be a surprisingly moving, gloriously weird love story". He concluded that the film was Lanthimos' "most accessible and purely enjoyable film yet". Chris Nashawaty of "Entertainment Weekly" gave a positive review and commended the film for being "visually stunning, narratively bold, and totally singular", adding that "it opens [one's] eyes to a new way of storytelling". Guy Lodge, writing for "Variety", called the film "a wickedly funny, unexpectedly moving satire of couple-fixated society", elaborating that Lanthimos' "confounding setup emerges as a brilliant allegory for the increasingly superficial systems of contemporary courtship, including the like-for-like algorithms of online dating sites and the hot-or-not snap judgments of Tinder". Peter Bradshaw of "The Guardian" rated the film three stars out of five, and wrote that "The Lobster" is "elegant and eccentric in Lanthimos' familiar style", but "appears to run out of ideas at its mid-way point".