TBM’s interactive tool measures whether critics affect box-office receipts.

At first it may look like a primordial soup of fledgling insights. But ignore the outliers, and note the general trend that better-reviewed blockbusters make less of their total tally in the first weekend. This implies that better-reviewed films don’t fade as quickly as the critical letdowns. When you run this through statistical regressions, though, the trend just barely falls below the threshold for statistical significance.

But all hope is not lost. Note that each dot is color-coded for its genre. Use the check boxes above the tool to start sifting through the movies, and click through so that only action movies—the blue dots—are showing. You’ll see that the trend from the bottom right to top left—that is, an inverse correlation between the review and the percent of the gross made in the first weekend—is much tighter than it was when all movies were displayed. To explain what that means, we have to resort to statistical geek-speak. Consider yourself warned.

The dots are tighter because the correlation between reviews and percent gross is stronger for action blockbusters than for any other kind of blockbuster. We’re 99 percent certain that there is a positive correlation between critical reviews and the percentage of total gross made in the first weekend. That’s far beyond the accepted threshold for statistical significance. (We should be sure to note that correlation does not imply causation. Just because there’s a relationship doesn’t mean better reviews cause more-equal box-office distribution. It could be the nature of a crummy movie to drop off dramatically after word of its badness gets out.)

And it’s using those data that we got our 32.7 percent number mentioned above. We won’t go into the nitty-gritty, but basically, we plugged Watchmen’s 57 Metacritic rating (as of Friday morning) into a regression equation, and it spit out 32.7 percent. E-mail us for more details.

It’s worth dwelling on why action films may have an especially strong correlation. Reviewing an action movie is more black-and-white than reviewing any other film. Explosions are either impressive or they’re not; dialogue is either wooden or serviceable; acting is either distractingly bad or adequately bland. That means when critics say an action movie is bad, it’s probably actually bad. And if a movie is actually bad, there will be less word of mouth among consumers, which translates into fewer ticket sales in the weeks to come. Hence, the top-heaviness in first-week sales.