Most bad titles I know of already go with bad movies, and the good movies have pretty good titles (I LikeNorth by Northwest, myself).
One candidate is the James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. There’s a definite “Bond Style” to book and movie titles. They’re short and punchy and suggest things – Thunderball, Moonraker, Live and Let Die. Even the newer, post-Fleming books and movies fit the style – Tomorrow Never Dies, Forever and a Day, Brokenclaw, Carte Blanche.
But On Her Majesty’s Secret Service? Too damned long. It’s not sexy. And you can’t put a tune to it. OHMSS (You have to abbreviate it. Nobody wants to write it out in full all the time) is the first movie since the first one, Dr. No, to lack a song, probably because you couldn’t really work the title into it.*
*From Russia with Love did have a song with the title in it – they just didn’t use it over the opening credits. They sing it at the end.
I guess it’s better than naming it after the book it was based on " The Coming Global Superstorm". And just calling it “Superstorm” sounds like a made for TV movie.
I think it’s a better title than the original “Die, Rinse, Repeat” or whatever it was called.
The original was a Japanese novel with an English title, “All You Need is Kill”.
Obviously, the… cavalier approach to grammar made the original title a hard sell. Edge Of Tomorrow is pretty generic as titles go, but I do think it got unfairly blamed for what actually was a marketing department unable to sell a pretty good movie with a superstar lead actor.
A New Hope is a terrible name for The Movie Formerly Known As Star Wars. I mean, if a new movie came out with that title, no one would want to see it; it would bomb.
The names are intended to be somewhat humorous. The three leads are each introduced at the beginning of the movie with their epithets. Tuco is first seen grasping a huge greasy hunk of meat as he escapes from the men who tried to kill him. He’s over-the-top scuzzy. Angel Eyes is shown betraying both of the two men who hired him to kill one another. He’s over-the-top evil. And Blondie betrays Tuco, indicating that calling him “the Good” is intended ironically. He’s only good in comparison with the other two.
It’s an extremely memorable title as well, and has entered English as an idiomatic expression for the positives, negatives, and screwed-up features of any situation. You can hardly have a better title than that.
“Live. Die. Repeat.” was never the title, just the tagline. The problem is they made the tagline so prominent in the marketing that people started to think it was the title. So then when it came out on DVD they started calling it “Live. Die. Repeat.: Edge of Tomorrow” which is just terrible.
I get annoyed with all of those series which try to include both the name of the overall series along with the name of the particular movie that you’re seeing.
Avengers: Infinity War
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
I’ll concede that some of these weren’t all that great as movies.
Stolen, I think, from Roger Ebert, the 1997 movie Volcano has “The Coast is Toast” as one of the marketing taglines. That might have made a better title.
Sorry but I forgot about the “great movies” requirement in the OP.
Deer Hunter - too nondescript Shawshank Redemption - too hokey. Andy was innocent of the charges, so he didn’t need redemption. I suppose Shawshank Penitentiary is a real place, but the word “Shawshank” is meaningless outside of the state of Maine, and doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Silence of the Lambs - “Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?” The backstory of her childhood trauma is, IMHO, too silly to name the movie after.
The Departed. It sounds like it refers to a specific dead person(s). Sure, we see a lot of people *become *departed but duh, it’s a gangster movie. We don’t need to be told there will be a lot of dead folks. It just feels feeble.
The Revenant – Not a common word. It means someone who was thought to have been dead who comes back. This may literally be true for this film, but it doesn’t help that a.) the word and its definition isn’t well known; and b.) its most common use is as a synonym for “vampire”, so it makes it sound like a horror flick.
It’s like the 1987 movie The Dead. Honestly, when you hear the title, your first thought is probably not James Joyce, but zombies. Heck, that’s the subject of the 2010 film of the same title ( The Dead (2010) - IMDb )
“Anthropoid”, a 2016 movie about two Czech soldiers who parachute into their occupied homeland to assassinate Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich, is really good.
But the title makes it sound like a sci-fi/horror flick.
