Production notes

Mike Myers first came up with the idea for Guru Pitka in the mid-1990s. The character was originally planned for the Austin Powers franchise. Myers began workshopping the character in New York comedy clubs in 2005. He billed these live shows as "An Evening With His Holiness the Guru Pitka". Myers said, "about a third of the audience were friends of mine who would come. A third of the audience would be people that had heard that I was doing it. And a third would be people thinking they were coming to see an actual guru. I did that for a year and I videotaped them and it informed me." Myers wore a prosthetic nose for the character both in the live performances and in the film. The Love Guru was in part inspired by Myers' career-long desire to make a hockey movie. A fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Myers described the film's plot as wish fulfillment, saying, "I figure the only way that my team will win a Cup is if I write it." First-time director Marco Schnabel had previously worked with Myers as a second unit director on the Austin Powers series, most notably Austin Powers in Goldmember. The Love Guru filmed in Toronto in August 2007. It was intended to start a franchise. John Oliver made his feature film debut in The Love Guru and was cast due to Myers enjoying The Daily Show. Samantha Bee filmed a cameo but only makes a silent appearance in the final cut of the film. Dialogue for her character is included in a bonus feature of deleted scenes contained on the film's home media release.

The film did poorly at the box office. In its opening weekend, The Love Guru grossed $13.9 million in 3,012 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking #4 at the box office behind Get Smart, The Incredible Hulk, and Kung Fu Panda, falling short of the $20 million range forecast by Hollywood pundits. The film grossed $32.2 million in the United States and Canada and an additional $8.7 million overseas, for a total of $40.8 million worldwide, against its $62 million budget. When the film was released in the United Kingdom, it ranked only #8 on the opening weekend.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 13% of 177 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 3.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "The Love Guru features far too many gross-out gags, and too few earned laughs, ranking as one of Mike Myers' poorest outings." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 24 out of 100, based on 33 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "B -" on scale of A to F. Jay Stone of the National Post gave the film one star and said the film "is shockingly crass, sloppy, repetitive and thin." Stone said, "Chopra is used almost as a product placement, taking a proud spot alongside a circus, a brand of cinnamon buns, the Leafs and, of course, Mike Myers." Stone also wrote, "the sitar based versions of pop songs like '9 to 5' are oddly watchable – but mostly the film is 88 minutes of ridiculous sight gags and obscene puns." A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote "The word 'unfunny' surely applies to Mr. Myers's obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again." Scott also commented that the appearance of actress Mariska Hargitay was anticlimactic. An ongoing gag in the film is the use of "Mariska Hargitay" as a phony Hindi greeting. Roger Ebert gave the film 1 out of 4 stars, writing, "Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents. Every reference to a human sex organ or process of defecation is not automatically funny simply because it is naughty, but Myers seems to labor under that delusion." Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News wrote a highly negative review, saying The Love Guru "isn't merely a bad film, but a painful experience." He considered it one of the worst films of at least the past several years and also declared it might ruin Myers's career. Mick LaSalle of San Francisco Chronicle was one of the few major critics who did not write the film off completely, stating "Mike Myers' new comedy, "The Love Guru," is a disappointment, but it's not a disaster, and that's at least something." Myers later poked fun at the film's failure in an appearance on the December 20, 2014 episode of Saturday Night Live, where he appeared as Dr. Evil (a character from his far more successful Austin Powers series), advising Sony Pictures on its cancellation of the release of The Interview: "if you really want to put a bomb in a theater, do what I did: put in The Love Guru."