12 Famous Movies That Were Almost Given Absurdly Bad Titles

By T.J. Barnard /

Giving a movie the name that it deserves is one of the most crucial stages in the life of a motion picture - can you imagine how many people would have turned up to see 12 Angry Men had it been called Jury Duty? Or what about if Star Wars had ended up as Droids? I made both of those up, of course, but my point stands: a movie lives and dies by its title. Make it too far out or wacky and people will avoid it out of fear. Make it too generic, bland or unforgettable, and you risk people not bothering at all. Many a good movie has flopped due to an ill-judged title, after all. You'll notice, then, that pretty much all of the movies considered to be the best or greatest of all-time have one thing in common - brilliant titles. Titles that, when you hear them, you're instantly intrigued and interested in knowing more. A good title provokes the imagination, of course,, and sticks with you long after you've heard it. Apocalypse Now. The Bridge on the River Kwai. Citizen Kane. You're not going to forget those titles any time soon. There's something about them. But movie titles change all throughout the development process, and sometimes the titles we end up with aren't the ones that were originally planned - here are 12 original movies titles that were discarded, all of which sound terrible in retrospect. Let's be thankful that they were all changed in time... before we were forced to spend the rest of our lives saying them out loud.