Is there a mathematical formula for making a successful film? Well, if there is, you can rest assured that movie studios would pay a lot of money to have such a thing in their hands, but after decades of movie making, the only thing they seem to know is that big name actors will draw a crowd. And if all else fails, pour all your money into promotion and you might be lucky enough to have a smash hit on your hands. When it comes to the success of a movie, there are just so many factors involved it seems impossible to predict — but according to Dean Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, there are still certain statistical relationships that distinguish a critical hit from a commercial one.

Simonton studies the science behind human creativity and leadership, and in 1999 started analyzing data from thousands of English-language feature films, submitting them to such tests as Pearson product-moment coefficients and hierarchical regression analyses. Simonton presented his findings at the annual American Psychological Association conference last week, and here are some of the things he found:

Critically acclaimed movies are usually R-rated, based on a true story or an award-winning play or novel, and the original author or the director usually have written the screenplay. On the other hand, if your movie has a big budget, is released during the summer, rated PG-13, opens on thousands of screens, and/or makes a lot of money in its opening weekend, then odds are it won’t garner many positive reviews. So let me get this straight — it took him 8 years to work out these complex hidden patterns?! Come on… this is hardly groundbreaking stuff. While it is somewhat interesting to see math applied to something so intangible, I hope for his sake the rest of the study turned up some slightly more substantial findings. I guess the one thing it does is reinforce the gap between critics and moviegoers. As columnist Tom O’Neil says, “Great critics tend to be social misfits with extraordinary powers of observation. Being misfits, they tend to bash sentimental movies because they remind them of a loving, nurturing world to which they do not belong.” Zing! Simonton is currently working on a book called Great Flicks: Scientific Studies of Cinematic Creativity and Aesthetics.