I’ve held a longstanding belief that in order to be a movie studio executive, one must merely possess a pulse. Intelligence, taste and business instinct are in no way required. These executives greenlight hideous projects, pour millions of dollars into them and then seem confused when the movie fails miserably. But it’s really not that hard to be successful. Just take the most current box office data (the current top 10 U.S. films) and do some fancy math stuff, and it’s easy to generate a formula for success. Observe.

See Exhibit A above.

First, take the total revenue of each of the top 10 films and divide it by an average ticket price of $7.50. Then divide that number by total number of weeks the movie has been in release. This produces the average number of tickets sold per week. Next, plot this on a graph against the cost of making the film (adding production and marketing costs). Clearly, as demonstrated here, there is an extremely positive correlation between cost and tickets sold.

Note: “Changing Lanes” was not included in this analysis because no cost data was available. “The Rookie” is an outlier because it performed high above expectations. This is good because Disney needs the money. “Blade 2” and “The Sweetest Thing” are also outliers because they underperformed expectations. This is because they suck.

Exhibit B:

Next, calculate average gross per week for each of the top 10 films and divide by number of weeks in release. Determine the gross per week averages for each rating bracket (R, PG-13, PG, G) and plot the results on a bar graph. Contrary to popular opinion, it is evident from this data that PG-13 is the must-have rating. It is probably inflated because of all the kids that buy tickets to PG-13 movies and sneak into R films. Movie executives are not concerned by this because they still get to keep the money.

Exhibit C:

Finally, create a set of brackets based on movie running time. For each bracket, determine the weekly grosses of all of the movies that fall into that length bracket. Calculate the weekly gross average for each bracket. Plot on a bar graph. As is evidenced above, short movies (80-90 minutes) make the most money. This is most likely because the world is full of impatient people. Long movies (110-120 minutes, 120-130 minutes) come in second for profits. This is probably because the world is also full of thrifty people who want to get lots of movie for their money. The worst thing to do to is make a medium-length movie. Those just alienate everybody.

In conclusion, just by taking a few minutes and looking closely at current figures, a formula for success is generated effortlessly. Since I am fairly certain movie executives cannot read, I hope they will get one of their minions to read them the following sentence: Money is sure to be made by producing an expensive, short, PG-13 film. Also, suckiness must be kept to a relative minimum. That will surely be the most challenging part.