There’s an art to crafting the perfect movie title, and we’ve certainly seen some great ones over the decades. We’ve also had the misfortune of encountering some absolutely terrible ones, too, so obviously Hollywood doesn’t always hit it out of the park. Most movies go through a few different names across their production — they have working titles that aren’t finalized and are never intended to be the official title, and/or they have code names during production if their cast and crew have been sworn to an amount of secrecy around the project. That’s standard.
Imagine if your favorite movie went by a completely different name, though. Would you still have gone to see it? Would it have excited you just as much? There are countless movies out there that nearly had completely different titles, maybe better ones, maybe worse ones, all of which were changed at some point during production or at the last minute once someone came up with something better.
Sometimes it was a close call. Sometimes it was a missive from the studio itself. Sometimes a director rebelled, knowing that their title was the superior one out of all the alternatives everyone else had thought up. Many of these alternate titles are bad. Some of them have a pretty nice ring to them, though. Here, we’ve gathered ten famous and beloved comedies, dramas, horror movies, and beyond that were almost called something totally different. Whatever the case, these movies’ titles are as iconic as the movies themselves, and we can’t conceive of a world where they went by anything else.
10 Iconic Movies That Almost Had Completely Different Titles
Would you have gone to see these if their titles were different?
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
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10 Movies with the Director’s Name in the Title
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is just one part of a long, confusing naming tradition.
