Um, I pointed out how Blade Runnerdoes fit as being misleading, even after seeing the film. Nothing in the film explains the source or underlying meaning of the term. Only that that is what certain cops are called. Hardly helpful.
Ghost World has the property that nowhere in the script is the word “ghost” mentioned. “World” is used several times, but only in a mundane (;)) sense. The phrase is a metaphor for Enid’s view of her life, but there’s no explicit discussion in the movie with her talking about this particular aspect. So you have to deduce after seeing the movie what the title might mean.
Most misleading title ever has to be William Friedkin’s follow-up film to The Exorcist.
Sorceror, 1977.
It had nothing to do with sorcery or the supernatural but was a remake of The Wages of Fear about truckers transporting a load of nitroglycerine over mountainous roads. (Good movie although not a patch on Clouzot’s original.)
I always wondered whether the title was forced on him by the studio, anxious to draw big crowds expecting another horror classic.
there’s all sorts of combinations of people during the movie, there’s scenes with four people, with six people, with ten people- Except at no point there’s a scene with eight characters.
You objected to this title being included, but neither clockwork nor oranges is referenced in the movie. Likewise, the titles of Reservoir Dogs and Straw Dogs are metaphorical but not explicitly referenced in the movies.
Oh man, how could I have forgotten my favorite film, “The Lion in Winter.” No large feline shivering in evidence. There IS a pineapple though, oddly enough.
A whole separate, but very related, category for book / movie titles would be: Titles that, while not being actually misleading, simply contain no clue whatsoever as to what the story is.
The most common type of this would be a title that is simply the name of the main character.
For example, the book Silas Marner. (The movie too, I guess.) The title is simply the name of the main character, and tells us absolutely nothing one way or another about what the story is.
At least if you know the book you might know what the movie was about. I wouldn’t count Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, or Moby Dick as misleading titles.
On occasion, however, biopic titles can be a bit misleading. While Gandhi basically wa about his whole career, Lincoln was mostly about the ratification of the 13th Amendment rather than a full biopic.
Some of the recent films produced by JJ Abrams (such as Cloverfield, Super 8 and 10 Cloverfield Lane) are titled and marketed so as to preserve some element of surprise.
Not really, in the movie it’s a red herring. Though in the TV show it’s something more.
Batman v Superman is not about a lawsuit or legal proceeding between Batman and Superman, which is the only instance when it’s acceptable to use that abominable v abbreviation rather than the much more cromulant vs.
