Films that would have fared better at the Box Office with a better movie title ?

They have changed the title of a new film here.

US - Ford v Ferrari
UK - Le Mans 66

I guess the UK title paints a picture of a film about a race, where as the US title is a little more vague.

 

UK cooler title imo.

 

The US title is more accurate. The film's much more about the Ford team's efforts to beat Ferrari than one particular race...

 

I liked the movie very much, but found the title, which didn't matter to me, suggested an action movie, which it wasn't.

I agree with what you said, but it was actually somewhat a mystery as it unfolded.

 

Agree. If anything, the movie shows an imperfect world.

 

The two I immediately thought of, both from the 1980s:

The Great Santini
The title makes it sound as if it's about a magician.

Howards End
When I saw the title originally, I thought it had a missing apostrophe (Howard's End) and thought it was a story about someone named Howard and either his demise or his ample backside.

 

I don't understand how some of the movies are considered flops if they made worldwide more than the budget?
like it says The Mummy with Tom Cruise was a flop, but it made a lot more than the budget

 

Due to a mix of factors, movies need to make about 2.5 to 3 times their budgets.

Based on that, the Cruise "Mummy" probably turned a small profit, but the studio expected a lot more from it.

They had a whole MCU-style franchise that "Mummy" intended to launch.

Crud, the 1999 "Mummy" made more worldwide and it came out 18 years earlier!

The 2017 film wasn't a studio-crushing flop, but it definitely disappointed - especially in the US...

 

Ladies In Lavender...a fantastic film with a horrible title.

 

The importance of being Ernest.

Ernest wasn’t even in the movie.

- Zach galifinakis

 

Honestly, I’m not one for reboots, but the Universal monster movies could have been a smash.

 

3 Billboards Outside Ebbing,Missouri.
A great film but a difficult to remember title that says nothing about the content .

 

I'm not even sure those should formally be viewed as "reboots" since there've been so many takes on Frankenstein, Mummy, Dracula, etc. over the decades!

I guess you could argue they intended to reboot the special Universal versions of the characters, but that water is muddied by the 87 billion sequels in the 30s/40s - which tampered with the original versions - as well as the 1999 "Mummy".

Was 2017 a reboot of 1932 or of 1999?

 

UNKNOWN - Liam Neeson


It's a pretty good Liam Neeson action-flick, but the title leaves a lot to be desired.

 

Wait, The Great Santini ISN'T about a magician? And why doesn't Howards End have an apostrophe?

Which is ironic because William Friedkin's Sorcerer is commonly considered to have one of the worst titles ever, one that killed its box office chances. Of course that movie was about a truck carrying dynamite, not about magic and wizards. Friedkin had another one called The Guardian about a killer druid nanny that seems similarly mistitled.

I'm going to say Licence to Kill was a very bad title for a Bond movie, one reason it has one of the lowest U.S. grosses of any Bond flick. It was supposed to be called Licence Revoked, but they thought U.S. audiences would think that sounded like a driver's license problem. But the title they used just sounds generic and gives you the impression that the movie is a standard Bond adventure with nothing new to offer, a reputation the series was struggling with by the late '80s.

Siskel & Ebert went on a rant about the title of It Could Happen to You in 1994. They said the original title of the film had been Cop Gives Waitress Two-Million Dollar Tip, which tells you a lot more about the plot. I'd say to shorten that to The Two-Million Dollar Tip. This episode also happened to contain Ebert's infamous trashing of Rob Reiner's North.



Nic Cage had another problematic movie title for the opposite reason, being too specific rather than too generic: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. The movie got stellar reviews but was a money-losing bomb despite its relatively low budget. There had to be a thousand titles that would've sounded better than that. The director even made this extraordinary statement about the title, "I battled against the title from the first moment on, but I was not in a position to prevail. I can live with it, I have no problem with it at all. The title is probably a mistake, but so be it."

 

I’ve always thought the film “Jennifer 8” (starring Andy Garcia, Uma Thurman and John Malkovich) would’ve done better box office if the studio hadn’t used such a peculiar title.

 

How about just 8ight? It worked for that other serial killer movie Se7en three years later.

To this day I had no idea what Jennifer 8 was about. If you asked me I would've guessed some kind of sci-fi robot picture.

 

They would’ve been better off using the original working title of “A Policeman’s Story.” It’s kinda bland, but a lot less confusing.

 

The Hudsucker Proxy

 

Take the gross, divide by two. Movie theaters keep half (more or less). The studios get the other half, but are still on the hook for marketing costs, otherwise known as "prints and advertising" (P&A), which might be north of $100 million.

 

I'd always heard that the gross is divided unevenly, with the studio getting the majority in the first week, with the theater chains getting a greater and greater percentage the longer the film plays... which has resulted in the insane overemphasis on the first weekend (personally, I don't care what the most popular film in America is.)

 

The rule I heard for a while is that if a movie's gross equal to the budget, it will probably break even in a few years, because home video and TV revenues will probably be equal to the box office gross, making up for the share the theaters kept. Probably more true from 1985 to 2015. No idea what the situation is now with streaming on the rise and home video on the decline. There seems to be some indication that home video revenues have been slashed in this new era (hence why Hellboy 3 was not greenlit, they no longer expected home video would eventually make it profitable the way it did for the first two films). I'm not sure how a film's profits are going to be accounted for if the studio keeps it exclusive to their own streaming service. But the indication from Hollywood creatives is that leads to big losses on their profit-sharing because the profits are not credited to the movies. Everything is fuzzier now in the streaming era and it's not a good thing because it leads to the studio executives being able to do more of whatever they feel like doing and be less responsive to what the audience is indicating they want by direct purchases.

 

3x the budget is the minimum to make the film break even. A film’s budget can often be hidden as we don’t know what the total marketing costs might be.

 

Some of the titles mentioned are fine IMhO. It’s not necessarily about telling you what the film is about (although too generic a title can be problematic) it’s about creating an interest. Enigmatic titles can be intriguing but it isn’t just the title that sells the film-it’s the trailer, the actors and, of,course, the advertising. If you add (n word-of-mouth even films that are poorly titled can still do well. An example of a film that was poorly titled was William Friedkin’s “Sorcerer’ which implied a return to “TheExorcist” territory and even the image on the movie poster, while suggesting a tense thriller, didn’t clear up confusion that it was a remake of “The Wages of Fear” (or a retelling I guess since it is based on both the novel and the film). ‘Deadly Cargo” as exploitative and TV movie sounding as it is, would have been a better title. The film also had the misfortune and timing of being released in the wake of “Star Wars” and the disastrous “The Exorcist II” which May have confused audiences even further. The film went over budget which further meant it had to earn at least $50 million to break even. It’s a bleak, nihilistic tale that would have worked better with audiences in 1973 but not 1977. It’s still a stylish brilliant film but it’s timing could have been much better from a release perspective-it wasn’t a ‘summer tent-pole’ film. ‘Apocalypse Now’ at least had a more accurate title whe mit came out two years later.

 

Conversely, I feel that "The Road Warrior" fared well in the US because it wasn't distributed as "Mad Max 2" there.

I don't think that the first film had much success there upon its release. (The series' popularity on cable and in tape rentals grew after the success of "The Road Warrior")

But I digress.