We’ve gotten so used to endless promotional cycles and IP-driven experiences with built-in fanbases that we forget that the first thing we see just before a new movie comes out is its title. There’s a certain art to the movie title, especially those not already based on some other thing. A title only has about one to five words in which to indicate exactly what the audience is in for if they choose to watch it. You know exactly what you’re in for when you sit down for Alien, or Pulp Fiction, or Interstellar, or Everything Everywhere All at Once, and even if you haven’t seen anything but the title, you can take a guess at its content and probably come up with something pretty close.
Because it takes real effort to come up with a great title, there are always times when that effort doesn’t exactly pan out. Cinema is riddled with attempts at grabby movie titles that do exactly the opposite of grab, and are mainly memorable for the amount of confusion they inspire in anyone who sees them. You see a lot of this with movies in large franchise series with a million subtitles, but it can even happen to standalone films with titles only a few words long. They’re just the wrong words, in the wrong order, with the wrong sort of vibe.
Still, it’s always fun to look back on the bad movie titles of recent memory, and because we’ve done this before in a list that spans all of cinematic history, we decided to take a closer look at the more modern failed attempts at crafting the perfect title. Here, then, are the ten worst movie titles of this century, so far. There’s always room for more.
The Worst Movie Titles of the 21st Century
These titles are so bad we don’t even want to watch the movies.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
READ MORE: The Best Movie Titles in History
13 Terrible Movie Lines So Bad They’ve Become Iconic
These lines, and their deliveries, are so cringey we kind of have to love them.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
