Do critic reviews affect a film’s box office performance? Here’s what Chup actors Dulquer Salmaan,Sunny Deol have to say

Sunny Deol and Dulquer Salmaan’s next outing comes in the form of R Balki’s Chup: Revenge of the Artist. As the trailer suggests, the film revolves around the story of a dreaded serial killer who targets film critics who give bad ratings for the movies they review. Sunny and Dulquer recently opened up about whether they think that critics’ reviews actually sway the box office numbers of a film.

In conversation with Pinkvilla, Sunny said that film critics, like actors, were just doing their job, and they had the right to say good or bad things about the actors. Even though actors had a tendency to get touchy, emotional and angry over the reviews, especially when they enter the field, slowly they understood not to take such things too seriously.

Dulquer agreed with his co-star, and said that he himself had had those ‘angry thoughts. But now he had reached a stage where he felt much more secure as an actor. “When you first start out you don’t know what’s going to happen or whether you’ll be a failure, whether you’ll stop getting offers in films. So when they criticise you that early in your career, it is very scary”, he said. He added that he did have a tendency to focus on the negatives, but they also helped him perform better as an actor.

On the correlation between critics’ reviews and a film’s box office performance, Sunny said that he believes that actual cinemagoers do not look at such reviews. They usually looked at the trailer and came to the theatre to watch the film for its ‘intoxication’, and not because of what someone else said.

Dulquer echoed Sunny’s sentiments and said that the audience always knows. He said that people seemed to sense whether films were good or bad and added that ‘genuine’ critics' reviews were not that far from what audiences thought.

Chup: Revenge of the Artist will be released in theatres on September 23.