Do reviews kill movies run?

Reviews and reviewers aspect has once again become the center of all the storm in the industry for the past few weeks. First it was Suhasini Mani Ratnam who made a comment that only qualified people must write reviews. Later Kamal Haasan gave quite a contrasting opinion and said that any person who has bought ticket is eligible to criticise a movie. And now we have our own Telugu Film Chamber advocating to reviewers it would be better to postpone reviews by a week or so. Amidst all one is left flabbergasted for sure. Do movie reviews really kill a movie?

Let’s take an example of a very recent film and talk it’s box office via the reviews it got and finally what is the reason for the loses to producer.

Son of Satyamurthy that released few weeks ago was panned by reviewers but did it prevent from film getting top revenues in first week? The film is still continuing to run steadily based on its merits but if it were to emerge a loser in the end it would be owing to its own selling price to the distributors. Where does reviewers come into the picture here?

There are films like Uyyala Jumpala, Venkatadri Express, Oohalu Gusagusalade and Ala Ela etc. How many of these films have had benefits of good reviews? If not entirely surely the reviews played a key role in helping the fast spreading of word of mouth. Would this also amount to killing of movies run?

Bottom-line here is that no reviewers or reviews can kill the run of a big film or hurt producers. It’s the quality of the film itself along with its selling price that does it. Similarly small films are helped by reviews it gets. In either cases the media, print or electronic, doesn’t hurt anyone or any film. To think otherwise would be foolish of either the parties.