Earlier this month, BabyCentre, a popular parenting Web site, released its mid-year report on the top hundred names this year chosen by its members in the U.K.* Usually, the popularity of names stays roughly the same from one year to the next. But, this year, a name jumped two hundred and forty-three slots, into eighty-eighth place: Elsa. As in Elsa from a recent Disney film you may or may not have heard of, “Frozen.”
Since its release, “Frozen” has earned $1.2 billion worldwide, becoming the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time and by far the highest-grossing animation. That’s not to mention two Academy Awards, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, a soundtrack that’s garnered more than a million album sales and seven million Spotify streams, official YouTube video views in the hundreds of millions, and a DVD that became Amazon’s best-selling children’s film of all time based on advance orders alone.
The film’s success transcends the commercial realm. It’s on the streets in the guise of little girls (and boys) belting at the top of their lungs. (The wait time recently at Disney World to meet Elsa: five hours.) “Frozen” birthday parties, high-school boys leading “Let It Go” choruses, college students arranging movie nights. Adults, too, have been hit hard—many of them without children of their own to spur them on. “Frozen” has a Twitter hashtag that spans all age groups—#TheColdNeverBotheredMeAnyway—and fan videos that include adolescents and adults along with toddlers and teenyboppers. Jennifer Lee, one of the film’s directors, has documented “Let It Go” interpretations that touch on autism, cancer, and divorce. Even people who haven’t seen the film feel its constant presence. “I haven’t seen it but I know all the songs,” Molly Webster, a producer at Radiolab, told me. How? “There isn’t a single time I’ve walked down the street in N.Y.C. the last two months and some kid isn’t singing it.”
Why? What is it about this movie that has so captured the culture?
Predicting a film’s success is a fraught business. In 1983, Barry Litman, an economist at Michigan State who spent his career examining how different aspects of media contributed to success, posited that a movie’s performance was determined by three factors: its content, its scheduling, and its marketing. When he analyzed a hundred and twenty-five films released between 1972 and 1978, he found that actual movie type—like drama versus comedy or animated versus live—mattered far less than the story itself. High-quality stories—as determined by things like the reputation of the screenwriter and director coupled with timeliness, theme (as determined by film-guide descriptions), and critical ratings—trumped things like star power and name recognition. It was good if a certain degree of familiarity, the result of an adaptation, say, was thrown in for good measure. Release date was important, too, but secondary. The only timing that really mattered was whether a picture was released before Christmas. As for marketing, it wasn’t so much a film’s own advertising as less formal word of mouth that did the trick. Critical ratings and awards mattered, but not nearly as much as one would expect. Instead, it was the “buzz” leading up to a release that made a difference. In the end, though, Litman concluded, the findings were complicated: these factors could largely tell a dog from a general success, but they couldn’t predict the true runaway sensations. For a number of years, Litman’s research remained the most prominent empirical model of film success, summarized in his 1998 book, “The Motion Picture Mega-Industry.” But, as more nuanced metrics have become available, film scholars have begun to take a second look at the variables that may signal a hit movie.
In 2009, Dean Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis and a co-editor of the 2014 book “The Social Science of Cinema,” conducted a substantial reëxamination of the field, including Litman’s work, and found that, while Litman’s broad points held true, the formula got very messy very quickly. Sometimes awards and ratings mattered; sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes timing was key; sometimes it meant nothing. But a few things continued to stand out: story and social influence. The most important figure in determining ultimate creative success, Simonton found, was the writer. “We can learn a great deal about what makes a successful film just by focusing on the quality of the screenplay,” he declared. Still, as he’d found earlier, quality did not always translate to quantity: even the best screenplay could be a box-office dud. And the thing that could potentially be even more, or at least equally, predictive wasn’t easy to quantify: so-called information cascades (basically, a snowball effect) that result from word-of-mouth dynamics.
So what does all of this mean for “Frozen”? On the one hand, the movie shares many typical story elements with other Disney films. There are the parents dead within the first ten minutes (a must, it seems, in Disney productions), royalty galore, the quest to meet your one true love, the comic-relief character (Olaf the Snowman) to punctuate the drama. Even the strong female lead isn’t completely new—think “Mulan” and “Brave.” But “Frozen,” it seems, has something more.
George Bizer, a psychologist at Union College, first became interested in the “Frozen” phenomenon when his seven-year-old daughter requested that they watch it. Normally, a parent shouldn’t be surprised when a young girl wants to watch a Disney-princess movie. But for Bizer’s daughter, the request was highly out of character. “My daughter is a princess-hating daughter,” he told me. “She has made us warn everybody in prior years that she didn’t want anything with princesses on it for her birthday. And if she got a princess, she would get angry. Really angry.” Why, then, would she want to go see a movie where not one but two princesses reigned? “ ‘It’s O.K., Daddy,’ she said. ‘These are strong princesses. I’m going to like it a lot,’ ” Bizer recalled. And she did.
That was enough to pique Bizer’s curiosity, and when he started seeing “Frozen” fans cropping up around the college campus, he realized that there was a potentially more powerful force at work. Union students, after all, weren’t your typical Disney-loving fans. Together with his fellow Union psychologist Erika Wells, Bizer decided to test possible theories on every psychologist’s favorite population: college students. They organized an evening of “Frozen” fun—screening and movie-themed dinner—and called it “The Psychology of Frozen.” There, they listened to the students’ reactions and tried to gauge why they found the film so appealing.
While responses were predictably varied, one theme seemed to resonate: everyone could identify with Elsa. She wasn’t your typical princess. She wasn’t your typical Disney character. Born with magical powers that she couldn’t quite control, she meant well but caused harm, both on a personal scale (hurting her sister, repeatedly) and a global one (cursing her kingdom, by mistake). She was flawed—actually flawed, in a way that resulted in real mistakes and real consequences. Everyone could interpret her in a unique way and find that the arc of her story applied directly to them. For some, it was about emotional repression; for others, about gender and identity; for others still, about broader social acceptance and depression. “The character identification is the driving force,” says Wells, whose own research focusses on perception and the visual appeal of film. “It’s why people tend to identify with that medium always—it allows them to be put in those roles and experiment through that.” She recalls the sheer diversity of the students who joined the discussion: a mixture, split evenly between genders, of representatives of the L.G.B.T. community, artists, scientists. “Here they were, all so different, and they were talking about how it represents them, not ideally but realistically,” she told me.
Another strong point of appeal: the story keeps the audience engaged because it subverts expected tropes and stereotypes, over and over. “It’s the furthest thing from a typical princess movie,” Wells says. “The handsome prince is evil. The person with the magical powers is good. It spins Disney on its head.” It also, unlike prior Disney films, aces the Bechdel Test: not only are both leads female, but they certainly talk about things other than men. It is the women, in fact, not the men, who save the day, repeatedly—and a selfless act of sacrifice rather than a “kiss of true love” that ends up winning. “Frozen” is, in other words, the strong, relatable, and nuanced story that Litman and Simonton identified.
To James C. Kaufman, a psychologist at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut and Simonton’s co-editor on “The Social Science of Cinema,” it isn’t surprising that an atypical, boundary-pushing film about princesses would succeed. In 2012, he and Simonton conducted a study of two hundred and twenty family films released between 1996 and 2009, to see whether successful children’s movies had certain identifying characteristics. They found that films that dealt with nuanced and complex themes did better than those that played it safe, as measured both by ratings on metacritic.com, rottentomatoes.com, and IMDb and by over-all financial performance. What works for children’s films is more or less the same as what works for adult ones. “A good story, issues to think about and wrestle with,” Kaufman told me. “I think the best kids’ movies have enough adult elements in them to hold on to both. I don’t know if you can extrapolate from kids to adults, but you can certainly extrapolate from adults to kids.”
Still, story is only part of the picture. Plenty of nuanced, relatable, boundary-pushing films don’t do as well as “Frozen” has—and in their 2012 review, Simonton and Kaufman were able to explain only twenty to twenty-four per cent of variance in critical success and twenty-five in domestic gross earnings.
The other element, of course, is that intangible that Litman calls “buzz” and Simonson calls “information cascades,” the word of mouth that makes people embrace the story, want to pass it on, and persuade others that they actually want to see it. It’s the force that made Bizer’s daughter identify the fact that she would love “Frozen” even though she hadn’t yet seen it, because she knew in advance it would have the other kind of princess—the one who wasn’t at all princess-like.
Part of the credit goes to Disney’s strategy. In their initial marketing campaign, they made an effort to point out the story’s uniqueness. “Disney worked very hard to make it appeal to everybody,” Bizer says, from the trailers to the posters to the title of the film itself. They released the movie in November—the time that fits into Litman’s optimal release timing. And their lawyers allowed the music to spread naturally through social media. “The fact that Disney didn’t crack down on the millions of YouTube tributes, the fact that it’s been played everywhere, feeds back into the phenomenon,” Kaufman says.
And part of the credit goes to Jennifer Lee’s team, for the choices they consciously made to make the screenplay as complex as it was. Elsa was once evil; Elsa and Anna weren’t originally sisters; the prince wasn’t a sociopath. Their decisions to forego a true villain—something no Disney film had successfully done—and to make the story one driven by sibling love rather than romantic infatuation have made “Frozen” more than simply nuanced and relatable. They’ve made it more universally acceptable.
Disney has had a history of being accused of one form of social slight or another, with criticisms including racism, overly stereotypical gender roles and the princessification of society, and gruesome and unnecessarily psychologically disturbing content. In contrast to other recent Disney films, like “Tangled,” “Frozen” isn’t politically fraught or controversial: you can say it’s good without fear of being accused of being a racist or an apologist or an animal-rights opponent. It’s pre-approved for admiration by adults, not just children. Part of the movie’s success, then, may have just as much to do with parents as with kids. Kids aren’t just liking it more; parents are taking their kids to see it more.
And even if you aren’t a “Frozen” convert, it may not matter for the film’s ultimate success once that word-of-mouth tide begins. Wenjing Duan, a professor at George Washington University who studies Internet marketing and online user-generated content, has found that, in the online world, awareness itself, not positive or negative slant, is the key issue. The greater the volume of postings and reviews, even if the views are nasty—and “Frozen” hasn’t been immune from those either—the greater the awareness of the movie all around and the higher the box-office returns.
We should be cautious, though, about over-interpreting anything. I can explain “Frozen” all I want, but that doesn’t mean I’ll have found a formula for reproducing its success. “I think that the things that work for ‘Frozen’ are the things that aren’t as easily copied,” Kaufman says. “I think you’ll see in the next few years films picking up the wrong elements. And if you see movies with strong female characters, great. But what’s at the heart of ‘Frozen’ are the relationships, the very adult emotions that you can’t easily knock off. ‘Frozen’ got Tony Award-winning songwriters, Tony-level singers. But that’s just a shortcut, not the whole story.”
When I ask Simonton for his take on the “Frozen” phenomenon, he brought up what he calls the “sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” “It’s one thing to predict critical acclaim, movie awards, and box office,” he says. “Quite another when a children’s film like Frozen goes viral. If anybody knew, they’d have a great job at Pixar or Disney.” Or, to echo the words of the screenwriting legend William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.” In the end, it may just be a bit of magic.
When it comes to naming trends, though, here’s one prediction you can be confident about: a lot of babies are going to be named Elsa throughout the year.
* An early version of this post suggested that the ranking of names was global and not specific to the U.K.
