A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they’re in. Here’s a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how often, when and maybe even why that happens.
I was impressed until they listed “Barbie” as the worst offender for title drops, followed by a Mickey Mouse documentary with “Mickey” in it’s name. When the title is the name of the main character, it’s not really a title drop. They took a lot of effort to remove “The” “An” “Episode” and other filler words from titles to clean it up. Then immediately went “well the winner is Barbie”. No duh?
Those movies should have been eliminated from the rankings, or kept in their own category. Rudy, Coraline, Leon: The Professional(since Leon would count), and many other movies would have this issue too. Or what about “Her”? Is a pronoun really a title drop?
This seemed really insightful until obvious outliers were still included and treated as valid.
It’s also kinda the same thing with any proper noun or plot related element. They list Lord of the Rings: Two Towers, but the two towers are literally locations that they reference in the movie. Maybe that’s more of a stretch, but it seems kinda weak.
I felt the same about locations. Fargo takes place IN FARGO. They say it’s name more than a few times. But it’s always entirely relevant location information when said.
But then I thought about Jurassic Park. It is a location. But it’s also a location made up for the movie. So it should count, yes?
Nouns/verbs/adjectives for title names are very iffy, I agree. I’m just not sure where exactly to draw that line. Maybe real vs made up?
Yeah, I think movie name drops are more contextual than just the movie name appearing. I think Suicide Squad and Back to the Future are more what we typically think of. Odd or new phrases/concepts that we wouldn’t think would pop-up in normal conversation.
I didn’t even consider Barbie to meet this threshold cause what else were they going to call her during the movie.
Exactly, you couldn’t call her anything else.
With my Jurassic Park example, I feel like the iconic “Welcome to Jurassic Park” was a title drop, but any simple reference to the name as a matter of fact wasn’t. It’s definitely contextual like you said.
I’m with you. A little underwhelming when the main protagonist is the name of the film. I wanted to see more stats on multi word phrases that were titles.
Prediction: John Wick.
Edit: I was way wrong
