The long 038; short of it
Hollywood has come down with a serious case of title elongation,with summer releases sporting book-length titles to attract moviegoers attention....
Pity the high school students whose summer jobs involve changing movie theatre marquees. Hollywood has come down with a serious case of title elongation. That is,if you can figure out the title at all.
There was a time when summer movies came with tidy,muscular names: Speed. Armageddon. Twister. Now,with studios churning out more sequels than ever,and eager to link their new releases to existing brands or signal a franchise in the making,titles have grown exponentially.
Add in simultaneous 3-D offerings,and splice that into subcategoriesShrek Forever After 3-D,Shrek Forever After: An Imax 3-D Experienceand the listings become even more confusing.
Coming in the next few months are Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,Cats amp; Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Art houses will receive the comedy Happy Thank You More Please. The colon-crazy executives over at Warner Brothers have a movie coming out based on the book Guardians of GaHoole. But some recent title surgery has made it Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of GaHoole.
Its enough to make Nanny McPhee Returns,a sequel coming in August from Universal Pictures,seem downright spare.
Elaborate titles can bring danger. The more a title describes the story,the less effective it generally is, said Dennis Rice,a marketing consultant who has held top positions at Miramax,United Artists and Disney. You want people to know what theyre getting. But you also want to leave them wanting to learn more.
And in a very practical sense,wordy titles take up a lot of time in a 15-second television ad and a lot of space on a poster. DreamWorks found a way around that problem with How to Train Your Dragon,however,by simply renaming the film in television commercials. The full title appeared on the screen,but the voice-over at the end urged people to attend Dragons.
None of these titles are selected without debate by studio executives and,in some cases,they are determined by focus group testing. With sequels,the strategy is generally to avoid adding a numeral,and to come up with a subtitle that makes the movie seem less of a rehash and more worthy of standing on its own. It wont be Kung Fu Panda 2,but rather Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom of Doom.
The exception,marketers say,are movies for which the genre is more of a draw than the content. People dont go to horror movies for the story as much as for the experience of being scared. So Saw VII is probably just fine. That movie is coming this fall. Sex and the City 2 signals to the groups of women who turned the first one into a phenomenon that they have the chance for a repeat girls night out.
In some instances,long titles result from an eagerness of studios to piggyback on a brand that already has currency in the marketplace. The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is based on the video game. Its not Why Did I Get Married Too?,but rather,Tyler Perrys Why Did I Get Married Too?,and the releasing studio,Lionsgate,will ask for a correction if you shorten it in a newspaper. Lionsgate also gave the world Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire,although that title stemmed from an effort to distinguish the drama from Push,a film released nine months earlier.
Title elongation has been building for years. Star Wars is now Star Wars: Episode IVA New Hope. The summer of 2003 brought Legally Blonde 2: Red,White amp; Blonde and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. Last year there was Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
And filmmakers over the decades have used elaborate titles to convey humour. The short I Killed My Lesbian Wife,Hung Her on a Meat Hook,and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney marked Ben Afflecks directing debut in 1993. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan arrived in 2006. And,of course,there was Stanley Kubricks Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,all the way back in 1964,and,three years later,the somewhat less timeless Oh Dad,Poor Dad,Mamas Hung You in the Closet and Im Feeling So Sad.
But never before have these book-length compound titles been so ubiquitous,and so frequently impenetrable.
Perhaps thats why there are signs that some studios and filmmakers are starting to sense an opportunity by swerving toward short and sweet. Amid a sea of punctuation,Salt,a coming thriller starring Angelina Jolie,grabs attention. Similarly,Inception,the latest from the director Christopher Nolan,will stick out like a sore thumb on July 16.
Even so,dont expect the movie industry to retreat anytime soon,especially as sequels still rule at the box office. Coming up are The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.
Hollywood can be accused of many things,but not knowing its audience is not one. Recall the German proverb: Empty heads are very fond of long titles.
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