When you’re selling a movie, you can have the biggest posters, flashiest trailers and as many Happy Meal toys as you want, but if the title sucks, then no one will go watch it. A simple, memorable title made up of a couple of easy to say words is the best. Nothing offensive, nothing too long or complicated. And try to get it to link into the film; that helps.
Sometimes a mistake is made and the title must be changed (like Neighbourhood Watch to The Watch following a tragic incident in America). Sometimes, however, changes can be made that are plain ridiculous. These aren’t where the title has changed in the adaptation from the source material (Wiseguys to Goodfellas), or when a previous title existed just for production sakes, (Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made For Under $10 Million That Your Reader Will Love But The Executive Will Hate to American Pie). No, these ridiculous changes are made late in the day by marketing execs with dollar signs for eyes. Here’s some of the worst and most bemusing.
A lot of entries on this list are incredibly recent, mainly due to the increased risk in non-franchised movies. When a film doesn’t have a built in audience, it has to be as widely appealing as possible, with a title designed to put off the smallest minority.
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13 Comments
The only legit complaint I have is Avengers Assemble. Terrible.
One title-change that really annoys me is changing Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone to Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone. Why did they change it? Because they didn’t think kids would want to read a book/see a movie with the word ‘Philosopher’ in the title -__-
I was so close to including that for exactly the reason you said, but I reasoned it was a change made by the publishers of the books, not the films so didn’t really belong on this list. It still beggers belief that a publisher would think it a necessary move.
(like Neighbourhood Watch to The Watch following a tragic incident in America).
I had no idea. Nice move.
I think caused a bigger stirr in America than over here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/mar/28/neighbourhood-watch-publicity-trayvon-martin
Wait, Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk and Thor are on Marvel’s B-list?
I’d say they were (maybe aside from Hulk). Go back five years and the thought of them standing strong alongside the likes of Spiderman and the X-Men seemed laughable. They werr all relative unknowns until the first Iron Man film became a big success.
“Gringo” is Hispanic slang for “white boy” essentially, in case you were still wondering
Gringo is a direct reference to soldiers of the United States during the US – Mexico war of 1846. Mexican soldiers would use the English words “green” and “go” as rally cry during battles. US soldiers wore green colored uniforms, so “green, go!”, and thus a new word was invented in the mid-1840s…
pretty sure it was ‘how i spent my summer vacation’ – which is an amazing title by the way. what i did on my summer vacation is a little wordy
The LEON change might have something to do with the JCVD vehicle LIONHEART, which was released in several international markets as LEON a few years earlier.
Are you high? Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America are not Marvel’s B-List. Damn…hurts to see such idiotic takes on popular culture on popular culture websites.
No I’m not high. From a non-comic book fan’s perspective in a pre-2008 world Iron Man, Thor and Captain America are; they were known, but I wager the majority of the public wouldn’t know the first thing about them. Spiderman, Hulk and X-Men have always been their biggest properties, hence why they’ve had multiple TV series each and were the first to recieve the big screen treatment.
Since Iron Man (and in particular Downey Jr.s brilliant performance), The Avengers have grown in the popular conciousness. If you still don’t believe me, ask yourself this; had we got The Avengers before the preceeding films, would it have been the box office smash it was?