Forrest Gump was released in the United States on July 6, 1994, and received widespread critical acclaim for Zemeckis's direction, performances (particularly those of Hanks and Sinise), visual effects, music, and screenplay.

Forrest Gump won six Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Hanks, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Visual Effects, and Best Film Editing.

This talent eventually allows him to receive a football scholarship at the University of Alabama in 1963, where he is coached by Bear Bryant, and witnesses Governor George Wallace's Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, during which he returns a dropped book to Vivian Malone Jones.

During basic training, he befriends a fellow soldier named Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue, who convinces Forrest to go into the shrimping business with him after their service.

At the anti-war March on the Pentagon rally, Forrest meets Abbie Hoffman and briefly reunites with Jenny, who has been living a hippie lifestyle.

However, the film primarily focuses on the first eleven chapters of the novel before skipping ahead to the end of the novel, with the founding of Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and the meeting with Forrest Jr.

In addition to skipping some parts of the novel, the film adds several aspects to Gump's life that do not occur in the novel, such as his needing leg braces as a child and his run across the United States.

[23] Roth delivered a screenplay in 1992, which Paramount Pictures chairwoman Sherry Lansing liked enough to bring the project to her studio, who acquired the rights from Warner Bros. in exchange for the script for Executive Decision.

[50] Forrest Gump narrated his life's story at the northern edge of Chippewa Square in Savannah, Georgia, as he sat at a bus stop bench.

[54] The scene where Forrest spots Jenny at a peace rally at the Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., required visual effects to create the large crowd of people.

[70] Even with such revenue, the film was known as a "successful failure"; due to distributors' and exhibitors' high fees, Paramount's "losses" clocked in at $62 million, leaving executives realizing the necessity of better deals.

The website's consensus reads: "Tom Hanks' rigorously earnest performance keeps Forrest Gump sincere even when it gets glib with American history, making for a whimsical odyssey of debatable wisdom but undeniable heart.

The screenplay by Eric Roth has the complexity of modern fiction...The performance is a breathtaking balancing act between comedy and sadness, in a story rich in big laughs and quiet truths...What a magical movie.

"[78] Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote that the film "has been very well worked out on all levels, and manages the difficult feat of being an intimate, even delicate tale played with an appealingly light touch against an epic backdrop.

"[80] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly said that the film was "glib, shallow, and monotonous" and "reduces the tumult of the last few decades to a virtual-reality theme park: a baby-boomer version of Disney's America.

"[81] Gump garnered comparisons to fictional character Huckleberry Finn, as well as U.S. politicians Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan and Bill Clinton.

[86] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called Gump "everything we admire in the American character – honest, brave, and loyal with a heart of gold.

"[87] The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin called Gump a "hollow man" who is "self-congratulatory in his blissful ignorance, warmly embraced as the embodiment of absolutely nothing.

"[88] Marc Vincenti of Palo Alto Weekly called the character "a pitiful stooge taking the pie of life in the face, thoughtfully licking his fingers.

"[89] Bruce Kawin and Gerald Mast's textbook on film history notes that Forrest Gump's dimness was a metaphor for glamorized nostalgia in that he represented a blank slate onto which the Baby Boomer generation projected their memories of those events.

[90] Writing in 2004, Entertainment Weekly said, "Nearly a decade after it earned gazillions and swept the Oscars, Robert Zemeckis' ode to 20th-century America still represents one of cinema's most clearly drawn lines in the sand.

It has been noted that while Gump follows a very conservative lifestyle, Jenny's life is full of countercultural embrace, complete with drug use, promiscuity, and antiwar rallies, and that their eventual marriage might be a kind of reconciliation.

She also notes that the film's screenwriter, Eric Roth, developed the screenplay from the novel and transferred to Jenny "all of Gump's flaws and most of the excesses committed by Americans in the 1960s and 1970s".

[86] Other commentators believe the film forecast the 1994 Republican Revolution and used the image of Forrest Gump to promote movement leader Newt Gingrich's traditional, conservative values.

Jennifer Hyland Wang observes that the film idealizes the 1950s, as made evident by the lack of "Whites Only"-signs in Gump's Southern childhood, and envisions the 1960s as a period of social conflict and confusion.

[86] Wang argues that the film was used by Republican politicians to illustrate a "traditional version of recent history" to gear voters toward their ideology for the congressional elections.

[115] National Review's John Miller wrote that "Tom Hanks plays the title-character, an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s.

"[116] Professor James Burton at Salisbury University argues that conservatives claimed Forrest Gump as their own due less to the content of the film and more to the historical and cultural context of 1994.

Among the artists featured in the film are Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aretha Franklin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Three Dog Night, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Doors, Canned Heat, Harry Nilsson, The Mamas & the Papas, The Doobie Brothers, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Seger, Randy Newman, Willie Nelson, Fleetwood Mac, KC & The Sunshine Band, and Buffalo Springfield.

The Indian film Laal Singh Chaddha, released in August 2022 and starring Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor in the title role, is an authorized remake of Forrest Gump, set in India between the late 1970s and the 2010s.