With the continued box office success of movies that receive less-than-stellar reviews (see: Hancock, 2008), critics might seem to be less relevant than ever, a perception manifesting itself in staff cuts at many news organizations. But a new academic study proves that critics do, in fact, influence a film’s performance in theaters.

Their biggest effect is accelerating the success of small, limited release films, many of which rely on word-of-mouth buzz and can take weeks or even months to catch on. By pointing out the best of the lot and publicizing films with small marketing budgets, critics can jumpstart the process by which an indie sleeper becomes a surprise hit. Likewise, positive reviews help sustain box-office performance for larger, blockbuster films, maintaining a film’s positive public profile independently of its initial marketing blitz.

The study, published in the academic journal Quantitative Marketing and Economics in late 2007, differs from previous studies by focusing on 46 specific critics and removing factors like a movie’s budget, cast and marketing costs. Its fine-point focus on certain critics actually helped the study accomplish a secondary task: identifying the most influential film reviewers in America. According to the report, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune and Manohla Dargis and Lawrence Van Gelder of the New York Times all disproportionately affect a film's performance. (Dargis wrote for the L.A. Times at the time of the report’s publication.)

Though the authors of the study, professors Peter Boatright of the Tupper School of Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, Suman Basuroy of Florida Atlantic University and Wagner Kamakura of Duke University, point out that their findings influence only the timing of a film’s success, as opposed to its total financial gross, they also maintain that its findings apply to a broad range of fields.

Boatwright specifically cites its impact on “experience” markets, which include things like music, restaurants, wines, video games and books, saying that in all these industries, critics act as “market gatekeepers” and that “these markets wouldn’t be the same without them.”