In addition to the film's multiple awards and nominations, it has also been recognized by the American Film Institute on several of its lists. The film ranks 37th on 100 Years...100 Cheers, 71st on 100 Years...100 Movies, and 76th on 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition). In addition, the quote "Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get," was ranked 40th on 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes. The film also ranked at number 61 on Empire's list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.

On his first day of school in 1956 Greenbow, Alabama, Forrest meets a girl named Jenny Curran who, unlike the other children, immediately befriends young Forrest. Due to leg braces fitted to correct a curved spine, Forrest is unable to walk properly. One day, a young truck driver stays at the boarding house that Forrest lives in with his mother. The young truck driver turns out to be Elvis Presley who, while playing guitar for him, becomes enthralled at the jerky hip thrusting movements that the hobbled Forrest makes while trying to dance. Later on, Elvis becomes famous by imitating the dance.

It has been noted that while Gump follows a very conservative lifestyle, Jenny's life is full of countercultural embrace, complete with drug usage, promiscuity, and antiwar rallies, and that their eventual marriage might be a kind of reconciliation. Jennifer Hyland Wang argued in a Cinema Journal article that Jenny's death to an unnamed virus "...symbolizes the death of liberal America and the death of the protests that defined a decade [1960s]." She also notes the film's Screenwriter, Eric Roth, when developing the screenplay from the novel, had "...transferred all of Gump's flaws and most of the excesses committed by Americans in the 1960s and 1970s to her [Jenny]."

Forrest is often bullied because of his physical disability and marginal intelligence. One day, while trying to escape some bullies chasing him, his braces fall off revealing the young Forrest to be a very fast Runner. Jenny yells to him, "Run, Forrest, run!" Despite his low intelligence quotient, Forrest's new running ability leads to him receiving a football scholarship to the University of Alabama in 1963, becoming a top running back, being named on the All-American team, and meeting President John F. Kennedy. After his college graduation, he enlists in the U.S. Army, where he befriends a fellow soldier named Bubba, who convinces Forrest to go into the shrimping Business with him when the war is over. In 1967, they are sent to Vietnam and, during an ambush, Bubba is killed in action. Forrest saves many of his platoon, including his Lieutenant, Dan Taylor, who loses both his legs. Forrest is awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism.

While Forrest is in recovery for a gunshot wound to his buttocks received while saving his platoon-mates, he discovers a talent for ping pong. He becomes a ping pong Celebrity and plays competitively against Chinese teams in ping pong diplomacy. At an anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., Forrest briefly reunites with Jenny, who has been living a hippie life. While in D.C. in 1972, Forrest meets President Richard Nixon and is put up in the Watergate hotel, where he accidentally reveals the Watergate scandal, ultimately forcing Nixon to resign.

Returning home, Forrest endorses a company that makes ping pong paddles. He uses the earnings to buy a shrimping boat, fulfilling his promise to Bubba. Taylor joins Forrest in 1974, they initially have little success. After their boat becomes the only one to survive Hurricane Carmen they pull in huge amounts of shrimp. They use their income to purchase a fleet of shrimp boats. Dan invests the money in Apple Computer (which Forrest naively thinks is "some kind of fruit company") and Forrest is financially secure for the rest of his life, but gives half of his earnings to Bubba's family. He then returns home to see his mother's last days.

In the late 1978, Jenny returns to visit Forrest and he soon proposes to her. She declines but slips into his bedroom and makes love to him that night before leaving early the next morning. Heartbroken, Forrest elects to go for a run. He decides to keep running across the country several times over three and a half years, becoming famous in the process.

In 1981, Forrest Gump recounts his life story to strangers who sit next to him on a bench at a bus stop in Savannah, Georgia.

The film is based on the 1986 novel by Winston Groom. Both center on the character of Forrest Gump. 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.

Filming began in August 1993 and ended in December of that year. Although most of the film is set in Alabama, filming took place mainly in and around Beaufort, South Carolina, as well as parts of coastal Virginia and North Carolina, including a running shot on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Downtown portions of the fictional town of Greenbow were filmed in Varnville, South Carolina. The scene of Forrest running through Vietnam while under fire was filmed on Fripp Island, South Carolina. Additional filming took place on the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, and along the Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, North Carolina. The most notable place was Grandfather Mountain where a part of the road is named "Forrest Gump Curve". The Gump family home set was built along the Combahee River near Yemassee, South Carolina, and the nearby land was used to film Curran's home as well as some of the Vietnam scenes. Over 20 palmetto trees were planted to improve the Vietnam scenes. Forrest Gump narrated his life's story at the southern edge of Chippewa Square in Savannah, Georgia, as he sat at a bus stop bench. There were other scenes filmed in and around the Savannah area as well, including a running shot on the Richard V. Woods Memorial Bridge in Beaufort while he was being interviewed by the press, and on West Bay Street in Savannah. Most of the college campus scenes were filmed in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California. The lighthouse that Forrest runs across to reach the Atlantic Ocean the first time is the Marshall Point Lighthouse in Port Clyde, Maine. Additional scenes were filmed in Arizona, Utah's Monument Valley, and Montana's Glacier National Park.

The Soundtrack reached a peak of number 2 on the Billboard album chart. The Soundtrack went on to sell twelve million copies, and is one of the top selling albums in the United States. The score for the film was composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri and released on August 2, 1994.

In 1995, National Review included Forrest Gump in its list of the "Best 100 Conservative Movies" of all time. Then, in 2009, the magazine ranked the film number four on its 25 Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years list. "Tom Hanks plays the title character, an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s. The love of his life, wonderfully played by Robin Wright Penn, chooses a different path; she becomes a drug-addled hippie, with disastrous results."

The screenplay for the sequel was written by Eric Roth in 2001. It is based on the original novel's sequel, Gump and Co. written by Winston Groom in 1995. Roth's script begins with Forrest sitting on a bench waiting for his son to return from school. After the September 11 attacks, Roth, Zemeckis, and Hanks decided the story was no longer "relevant." In March 2007, however, it was reported Paramount producers took another look at the screenplay.

The film is commonly seen as a polarizing one for audiences, with Entertainment Weekly writing in 2004, "Nearly a decade after it earned gazillions and swept the Oscars, Robert Zemeckis's ode to 20th-century America still represents one of cinema's most clearly drawn lines in the sand. One half of folks see it as an artificial piece of pop melodrama, while everyone else raves that it's sweet as a box of chocolates."

In December 2011, Forrest Gump was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. The Registry said that the film was "honored for its technological innovations (the digital insertion of Gump seamlessly into vintage archival footage), its resonance within the culture that has elevated Gump (and what he represents in terms of American innocence) to the status of folk hero, and its attempt to engage both playfully and seriously with contentious aspects of the era's traumatic history."

Forrest Gump won Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Director, Best Visual Effects, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing at the 67th Academy Awards. The film was nominated for seven Golden Globe Awards, winning three of them: Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, Best Director – Motion Picture, and Best Motion Picture – Drama. The film was also nominated for six Saturn Awards and won two for Best Fantasy Film and Best Supporting Actor (Film).

The film took 66 days to surpass $250 million and was the fastest grossing Paramount film to pass $100 million, $200 million, and $300 million in box office receipts (at the time of its release). The film had gross receipts of $329,694,499 in the U.S. and Canada and $347,693,217 in international markets for a total of $677,387,716 worldwide. 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. This has, however, also been associated with Hollywood accounting, where expenses are inflated in order to minimize profit sharing. It is Robert Zemeckis' highest-grossing film to date.