Just Stop Already! Issue #2: Bad Movie Titles

 

Just Stop Already!

 

Movies are a great art form, but Hollywood is a business, so if something translates into a financial success—whether it’s a type of movie or a trend or a genre—chances are it will be exploited and repeated until people are sick of it. But, sometimes producers, writers, and/or directors want to cut corners, or are just desperate to make money, or are creatively bankrupt. All of these factors result in frustrations for the audience that take on many forms, and in this series I explore some of the tropes, trends, bad habits, and financial exploits of Hollywood films. Sometimes when it comes to movies, I feel like saying…just stop already!

 

Issue #2: Bad Movie Titles

Last time, I dug into the deplorable dung heap of horror movie remakes and reboots, the quantity of which was too great to even really demonstrate. I eventually got derailed by another issue: movie titles. It raised a new question: why does it seem like movie titles are getting worse? More and more often there are new movies with titles that are either derivative of other titles or blatant copies. A couple horror movies got sequel-reboots that reused the same title as the original only with “the” added on. There was The Final Destination and The Predator, but as annoying as that is, calling a sequel the exact same thing as the original is way worse. If it’s a remake, that’s one thing. There’s Halloween, Halloween, and Halloween. One of them is the original, one of them is a remake, and one of them is a requel/sequel. We’ve already covered all that ground, but it gets worse.

I remember reading a book about screenwriting years ago and a page about titles stuck with me all these years. It described how an effective title is short, to the point, and captures the attention of the audience in a specific way. Long titles should be avoided, but then it identified some exceptions to this rule, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark (a good title, but pushes it for length). The deeper I’ve dug into the topic of movie titles, the truer I’ve found the advice to be. I love Pirates of the Caribbean. Which movie? The first one is my favourite, which bears the subtitle The Curse of the Black Pearl. So the full title is Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. It’s a great movie, it did very well at the box office, and it spawned a successful franchise, but the odds were a bit against it just from using that exhaustingly long title alone.   

I hate when a studio feels like they have to extend a movie title to include something more recognizable in it because they think if they don’t it won’t sell as well. You know what’s a great title? Furiosa. You know what’s a comparatively worse title? Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. If you saw Mad Max: Fury Road then you already know who Furiosa is, and since the Furiosa movie is a prequel, if you don’t know because you haven’t seen Fury Road it doesn’t really matter, but it’s as if the studio thinks they have to include that original title of Mad Max in there somewhere so people recognize it. That is just the latest example of such idiocy, but some other instances of this include Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, and Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. By the way, Mad Max creator George Miller originally planned to film two Mad Max movies back-to-back: one was called Mad Max: Fury Road, and the other was going to be called Mad Max: Furiosa.

Every major studio is guilty of giving movies bad titles—even Marvel has messed up on their titles. You know what’s nice about the Guardians of the Galaxy movies? The sequels are called Vol. 2 and Vol. 3. It’s related to the theme of music in the films and it’s easy to keep track of. The same goes for Iron Man. We have Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Iron Man 3. If you want to watch the solo Iron Man films in chronological order, there’s no confusion about how to do so. What if you want to watch the Ant-Man films in order? Well, you start with Ant-Man, of course, then follow it with Ant-Man & The Wasp, and then Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania. All right, so they made it work well enough without numbers, but Quantumania is a stupid title and they knew it. What about Captain America’s solo movies? Good luck. There’s Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Captain America: Civil War. If you knew nothing about Marvel movies or Cap, it’s anyone’s guess as to which order those go in.

I know what you might be thinking: what’s the big deal? You can just look up this information easily on the internet to save yourself any confusion. While that may be true, it’s still no excuse for naming movies badly, especially sequels. A good sequel title just adds a number after the original title. A cool subtitle isn’t even needed most of the time. The Godfather Part II started the whole numbering sequels thing, and at the time the studio thought it was a bad idea because it would make people not want to see it, but then when it went on to be a big success studios doubled down on the trend, and it worked well for a while, but then they started messing with it. You know what’s great about the Rocky franchise? There’s no confusion on chronology. You have Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV, and Rocky V. It’s easy to watch them in order as long as you know roman numerals. Uh-oh, but then there’s Rocky Balboa, which is the sixth movie, but unless you’ve been keeping up that isn’t going to be immediately obvious.

Sylvester Stallone’s other most famous franchise has a similarly confusing series of titles. There was First Blood, which works since it is the first movie to feature the character of John Rambo, then there was Rambo: First Blood Part II. Uh, OK, well it’s identified as part two so I guess that works. Then there’s Rambo III. The First Blood part is just gone now, which is probably for the best, but then the fourth one was just called Rambo! It’s like how the Fast and the Furious titles started losing words as the sequels went on, going from The Fast and the Furious (1) to Fast and Furious (4) and then just Fast Five. When I first saw the trailer for Fast Five in a theater I thought it was an original movie. I didn’t even realize it was part of the franchise. It looked and sounded like it was just about five characters who drove really fast and that was it. I guess that’s not inaccurate, sequel status aside.

James Rolfe of Cinemassacre did a video way back in 2006 called “Chronologically Confused about Sequel Titles” and covered some of these same issues, but that was quite a while ago. It’s been a problem for a long time, and he had no idea what was coming. There are some sequel titles that are just bizarre in how bad they are, like Darkman III: Die Darkman Die, Piranha 3DD, and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. Spellcheck really hated that last one. Then there are sequel titles that are so bad they’re brilliant, like Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Sometimes a title can ruin the box office run for a film and result in financial ruin. There’s a 1989 film based on the Manhattan Project (the creation of the atomic bomb) starring some great actors, including Paul Newman, John Cusack, Bonnie Bedelia, and Laura Dern, with a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone (the guy who did the legendary score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). Sounds like a recipe for success, right? The film cost 30 million dollars to produce, and only made three-and-a-half million for a return—a box office bomb, and no pun is intended. What was it called? Fat Man and Little Boy. I’m not saying the movie deserved to fail, but, c’mon, naming it after the two bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was probably not the right choice, and anyone who fell asleep in history class might not even have known those names had anything to do with atomic bombs. There were so many other things they could have went with for a title that I really don’t know what they were thinking.

What about when a movie just re-uses a title even when it isn’t a remake and has nothing to do with any other movie called the same thing? Last year there was a movie released called Robots, which looks like a sci-fi romantic comedy, and has nothing to do with the animated film also called Robots from 2005. There are at least three completely different movies all called Bad Company. The Scary Movie franchise was not the first to use that generic title, there was Scary Movie in 1991, and the Chucky franchise started out with a film called Child’s Play (a title that was re-used for the first two sequels and the remake/reboot) but there was previously an unrelated movie released called Child’s Play. If a title gets repurposed but the previous movie to use it came out long ago, that’s one thing, but a weird example is the movie Employee of the Month starring Dane Cook, which came out only two years after another unrelated movie called Employee of the Month. A classic example of this title imitation is Frozen (2010), a horror flick about people stuck on a ski lift, and Frozen (2013), the animated Disney phenomenon, but there’s also another movie called Frozen from 2005.

What do you think is the most re-used movie title in cinematic history? No one knows for sure. One contender is The Awakening, which has been used 34 different times when accounting for foreign titles being translated. A story that’s been adapted over and over again would be a clever guess, like Romeo and Juliet, of which I found roughly 40 film adaptations using that title, but surely the most re-used title has to be a generic word, like Love (67 matches on IMDB, and that’s just for the single use of the word, never mind how many movies couple that word with one or two others to form a title).

I don’t know if the screenwriters, the producers, the promotors, or just Hollywood in general should be scolded for these annoying, repetitive, exhaustive, and uninspired movie titles, but let’s work on coming up with some new word combinations, new names, and new ideas for titles, shall we? I love coming up with titles for things, so if help is needed, all you need to do is ask. 

 

Related: Top 10 Worst Movie Titles

https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2016/08/top-10-worst-movie-titles-ccc-issue-56.html