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.