20 Best Movie Taglines Of All Time
They had your curiosity, and now they have your attention
There’s a lot of marketing involved in the movie business these days, with studios rumoured to often spend half an upcoming film’s budget again – if not a good deal more – in the build-up to that all-important opening weekend.
It was not always thus.
Not too long ago, ‘sleeper hits’ and ‘movies with legs’ would find their audience over time. Nowadays, new releases are effectively caffeine-charged amputees catapulted into the fray at ridiculous speed. The first Star Wars opened in 32 theatres in the U.S. on 25 May 1977, expanding to a whopping 43 screens in the couple of days that followed. And Captain America: Civil War? 4,226 screens. Let that sink in for a moment.
Marketing can take on many different forms, from custom-made viral campaigns to teaser trailers to those ever-spoilerific toy lines. But the humble tagline still stands at the vanguard, adorning movie posters with pithy slogans that sum up their wares in artful, ironic and often hilarious ways.
Some taglines embody the spirit of their films to such an extent that just hearing them brings it all rushing back in a blink, and here are 20 of the very best.
20. There’s Something About Mary
The tagline: ‘Love is in the hair.’
And you don’t need to go back too far to find a sleeper hit, for that’s what There’s Something About Mary was on its release in the summer of 1998. The Farrelly brothers’ gross-out comedy arrived in theatres with little fanfare and left with a massive $370 million as the highest-grossing comedy of the year.
The Farrellys hit the big time with Dumb And Dumber in 1994, and while follow-up Kingpin has since become a cherished cult classic it nosedived on release, barely making back its budget.
The director duo went all out for There’s Something About Mary but Cameron Diaz had reservations about the ‘special’ hair gel gag, fearing the implications for the film itself and her future career if the joke didn’t land.
Those fears were put to bed when, according to the Farrellys, the first test screening saw the audience “falling out of their seats into the aisles, literally into the aisles” when the moment in question occurred.