Filmmakers are good at making films. Sometimes they aren’t so good at coming up with names for those films, so somebody in marketing has to come up with a better one. Here are some early, working titles of major movies.
Annie Hall: Woody Allen tried several different titles, including A Rollercoaster Named Desire, It Had to Be Jew, and Anhedonia (a word that means the inability to feel pleasure).
2001: A Space Odyssey: How the Solar System Was Won
Child’s Play: Batteries Not Includes
Friday the 13th: A Long Night at Camp Blood
Alien: Star Beast
Reality Bites: Ben Stiller’s movie about Generation X-ers trying to find their place in the world was originally titled The Real World. He was forced to change it when MTV debuted the reality series The Real World, about Generation X-ers trying to find their place in the world.
Basic Instinct: Love Hurts
The Breakfast Club: The Lunch Bunch
Halloween: The Babysitter Murders
Letters From Iwo Jima: Men From Mars
Scream: This self-aware horror movie in which a murderer kills according to the rules of horror movies was originally titled Scary Movie. Ironically, in 2000 a movie parodying Scream was released, and it was titled Scary Movie.
Boys Don’t Cry: Take It Like a Man
Pulp Fiction: Black Mask
2012: Farewell, Atlantis
Some Like it Hot: Not Tonight, Josephine
Last Action Hero: Extremely Violent
American Pie: Screenwriter Adam Herz tried to unabashedly appeal to movie studios when he submitted his script with the title Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made For Under $10 Million That Your Reader Will Love But the Executive Will Hate. (It was also briefly called Comfort Food.)
Big: When I Grow Up
50/50: I’m With Cancer
Back to the Future: Spaceman from Pluto
Titanic: The Ship of Dreams
Psycho: Wimpy
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