A Brief History of Movie-Title Changes
The good (Pretty Woman), the bad (Tarot), and the ugly (Live. Die. Repeat.).
Filmmaking involves a lot of editing. Typically, that refers to film editing in the Oscars sense; looking at take after take of raw footage and cutting it together into something coherent. But on occasion, there are other types of edits, too. Like, for instance, editing the name of a movie into something completely different.
Tarot, a new horror movie out this week, suffered one such title change. The film, which follows a group of friends who start getting murdered in spooky, supernatural ways after using the wrong tarot cards to tell their fortunes, was originally titled Horrorscope. Is Tarot a perfectly fine name for a movie about killer tarot cards? Yes, sure. But is it as good as Horrorscope, the pun-tastic name of the novel the movie’s based on? No, of course not.
Movies get their names changed for all sorts of reasons and to mixed results. Occasionally it’s because the studio worries that the title of the source material might work for a book, but it’s not a moniker that’ll sell at the box office. Sometimes it’s because they simply lack the courage to give a great name a shot, opting to go with something safe instead. Then there are perhaps the best, more pure type of name change: the ones when they thought of a better idea. And if you think a movie is safe from name changes once it’s already come out, think again: The retroactive name change exists.
Here’s a list of some of the main reasons why movie titles have changed, along with a few of the best and worst examples of each. The categories have overlap, and it’s not a complete list, because there are too many movies that have had name changes to, uh, name. You also won’t find “fake” titles on this list. Return of the Jedi had the fake working title of Blue Harvest in an attempt to hide the production from unwanted attention. It was never actually going to be released in theaters as Blue Harvest. Likewise, you won’t find movies on this list that were never officially given the titles that everyone assumed or hoped they would get. As much as the M3GAN sequel should’ve been titled M4GAN and the 47 Meters Down sequel should’ve been titled 48 Meters Down, those were never official titles, so they weren’t technically changed to the much, much, much worse titles M3GAN 2.0 and 47 Meters Down: Uncaged.
Let us never forgive them for changing the name of the Plane sequel from Ship to Plane 2: Stowaway, though.
From Heady Sci-Fi to Bankable Blockbuster
It’s very common for a movie based on a book to have a different title than the book. Often these changes are minor and make sense. Something like dropping the subtitle of the book Moneyball was based on, The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, makes perfect sense. Trimming a wordy title to make it more punchy, like axing the first part of Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption from the adaptation of Stephen King’s novella, is a title tweak, not a full-blown name change.
What’s not minor is something like Blade Runner, which is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? That’s a great title, but would an intentionally puzzling, full-sentence question be a good name for a movie with blockbuster aspirations? Maybe not, which is why Ridley Scott and the producers took the name from The Bladerunner, a totally different and essentially unrelated sci-fi book from the ’70s.
This sort of change, from something more esoteric and intellectual to something with more perceived box-office impact, is common. “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” another Dick story, became Total Recall. Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” became Arrival, “Who Goes There?” became The Thing, The Midwich Cuckoos became Village of the Damned, and I Am Legend became The Last Man on Earth and The Ωmega Man (though the Will Smith adaptation would keep the original title, even if it changed the ending).
Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Fog Horn” got what at first seems like the reverse treatment when its film adaptation got a much longer title, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. And yet, the same motivation is there. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms is a blunter, more active title — and one more likely to draw audiences into a giant monster movie.
Michael Crichton’s horror-tinged historical-fiction book Eaters of the Dead was renamed The 13th Warrior during its troubled production, a move that Crichton himself pushed for due to concerns that the more ominous name would turn audiences away from the more action-oriented flick. (This did not save the movie from being a historical box-office bomb.)
The Japanese sci-fi manga All You Need Is Kill was renamed Edge of Tomorrow, though the movie got another name change after the fact — more on that later.
Getting Rid of Genre Confusion
If studios think, perhaps correctly, that a source material’s complex, geeky title will turn off ticket buyers at the box office, that concern is perhaps even more true for non-genre films. That can explain why something like Stephen King’s “The Body” became the movie Stand by Me. The short story is about a bunch of kids setting off on a hike to see a dead body, yes, but the name likely conjures different expectations in moviegoers who are more familiar with King’s horror work, like The Shining.
Another more recent example can be seen in the 2015 book Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, whose name was changed to Love, Simon for the 2018 movie. It’s a teen rom-com, not some sort of scientific battle.
We Thought of a Better One
Of course, not every movie is an adaptation of something preexisting, which makes the title more ephemeral in the lead-up to release. Sometimes, as the movie develops, the studio and the creatives will realize that the initial title isn’t exactly selling what the film is about. There are countless examples of movies changing their working titles for the better as production goes on, but here are a couple of examples of when the name change happened late enough in the game to be especially noteworthy.
Consider Return of the Jedi, which was originally meant to be titled Revenge of the Jedi. Early posters for the highly anticipated third Star Wars movie were printed with the original name, but George Lucas & Co. eventually decided that “revenge” was not especially befitting of a Jedi knight.
Pretty Woman was originally titled $3000, in reference to Julia Roberts’s character’s weekly take as a prostitute. The original script was much darker than the rom-com the final film turned into, and the less transactional, lighter final title reflected that.
Woody Allen was at one point very seriously considering titling the movie that would become Annie Hall after the psychological inability to experience pleasure, Anhedonia.
Wes Craven’s meta reinvention of the slasher genre, Scream, was originally called Scary Movie, giving it an even more meta (and even more generic) title. This was another correct call, as despite its self-aware tendencies, Scream is still a legitimate horror movie. Scary Movie was a name better saved for the parody franchise that would spring up a few years later.
Snakes on a Plane almost suffered the opposite fate when producers thought of a worse name than the original one. Snakes on a Plane was likely spared the fate of being a forgettable early-’00s action flick because its name went viral. Naturally, there was outrage when they tried to rename the movie Pacific Air Flight 121, and they reverted to the original title before release.
Real-World Considerations
While most movie name changes are done for creative reasons (or at least creative ways to try to get audiences’ attention), occasionally there are more pragmatic, reactionary reasons for a change.
In 2012, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, and Richard Ayoade were set to star in Neighborhood Watch, a comedy about a group of neighbors who discover an alien invasion threatening their homes. However, a few months before the movie’s July release, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teen, was killed by George Zimmerman, a member of his own neighborhood watch. Instantly, and for good reason, the term “neighborhood watch” became toxic, especially for a sci-fi comedy, and it was renamed just The Watch.
Lee Daniels’ The Butler wasn’t supposed to feature the director’s name so prominently. The addition of his name to the drama about a long-serving White House staffer was a title change prompted by a legal squabble. Warner Bros. threatened to sue the Weinstein Company because they had a movie called “The Butler” — never mind that it was a lost short from 1916.
Retroactive Sequels
Even if there are a lot of title shuffles, in a sense it doesn’t really count if all the name swaps happen before the movie comes out. Even if the crew had swanky jackets printed with the original title or there are first-run posters with the old name out there (all of which are valuable collectibles, now), everything that happens before a film comes out is up in flux. It’s the post-release name changes that feel more real, because the original title was, at one point, the one on the marquee.
Sometimes it’s a simple act of retroactive continuity. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark was originally just titled Raiders of the Lost Ark, but after it became a franchise, Spielberg went back and added “Indiana Jones and the …” to the title so that it would match the sequels’ naming conventions.
And, this should be obvious, but moviegoers in 1977 weren’t buying a ticket for a movie called Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope. That would have been insane and made no sense. It was originally just called Star Wars, and everything else was added as the franchise expanded.
An inversion of this is the 2016 Ghostbusters, which was saddled with the subtitle Answer the Call. Though technically present in the end credits of the film, the post-colon portion of the title serves as a means to distinguish the 2016 movie from the otherwise identically titled 1984 original — and it feels like a convenient way of distancing the unfairly maligned all-women reboot from the rest of the franchise now that Afterlife and Frozen Empire have picked up the old continuity.
Post-Release Changes
A post-release name change just to make a movie fit with the rest of the franchise is one thing. A post-release name change because the original name was, upon reflection, not good, is another.
The 2009 British film The Boat That Rocked bombed at the U.K. box office, prompting a rushed recutting and a new title, Pirate Radio, in the United States. (It bombed again.) The 2013 rom-com Can a Song Save Your Life?, starring Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to some acclaim, but it was renamed Begin Again after the festivals and before its wide release because audiences kept messing up the wordy original title.
The Tom Cruise time-loop sci-fi actioner Edge of Tomorrow already had a different title than its source material, All You Need Is Kill. After it underperformed at the box office, physical releases featured the tagline “Live. Die. Repeat.” more prominently than the movie’s actual name. This attempt to entice an audience who might not have grokked what Edge of Tomorrow’s whole deal was might not technically have been a name change, but it was deliberate and overt enough that Live. Die. Repeat. functionally became a second name, and it could even be found under the new name on iTunes and other third-party rental services.
Warner Bros. maintains that it didn’t change the name of Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) to the more straightforward Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey and that it was actually the movie theaters who made the change, which puts more emphasis on Margot Robbie’s title character and makes the film a bit more searchable. (Search-engine optimization directing what things are called? Wow, they’re just like me FR.)
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