10 Best Movies Named After Popular Songs

When Roy Orbison sang about a "pretty woman, walkin' down the street" on his 1964 chart-topper (actually titled Oh, Pretty Woman), he probably wasn't imagining an actual street walker. Nevertheless, that's exactly the kind of pretty woman who is the prostitute protagonist of the hit film which takes its name from his most famous song.

Pretty Woman began life as a script for a serious drama about the dark side of sex work and drug addiction in Los Angeles. The screenplay, by Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death helmer JF Lawton, was simply titled 3000 (the amount in dollars that Richard Gere's Edward offers Julia Roberts's Vivian to spend the week with him) and ended with Edward dumping Vivian and her getting on a bus to Disneyland with a fellow sex worker.

Once the actual Disney company got involved, though, all that had to change and 3000 got retooled into Disney's favourite genre: the fairy tale.

That mercenary title had to change too, then, and with Garry Marshall now making the movie as Pygmalion with hookers it seemed more appropriate to name it for a favourite romantic pop classic.

Pretty Woman was a huge box office smash that both launched Roberts as an A-list star and helped revive the romantic comedy genre. Not only that, but, led by the title song, its soundtrack also went multi-platinum and got that original Orbison riff stuck in everyone's head once more.