I’ve noticed over the years a few movies occasionally get the same title, but are completely different pictures.
An easy example is Bad Boys
The first is a movie about teen criminals starring Sean Penn
The second is a buddy-cop movie starring Will Smith
I would think that a movie title would be protected by something like a copyright, but apparently not in this case… Unless, of course the second movie bought the name from the first.
Is this how it would be done? Or if given enough time, can a movie be named anything as long as enough time has elapsed between pictures? (If so, I will be creating a new Gone With The Wind).
One unusual example I noticed is Employee of the Month. That title was used by two different mainstream American movies released only two years apart (2004 and 2006).
As others have mentioned, titles can’t be copyrighted or trademarked as a title. They can still have other protections in other areas so you can’t make a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie because it’s trademarked as a toy line.
So how does it work? Well, all the big Hollywood studios just kind of agreed to not name their movies after another movie. So they formed the voluntary Title Registration Bureau where they would submit their title and all the other studios get to raise their complaints.
If you’re at a studio and want to name your birdwatching documentary The Booby Trap you submit it to the Title Bureau. They send a notice out to all the members who then come back with complaints. Universal can come back and say “no, we have a 1957 bomb squad thriller named that and we don’t want the audience to be confused.” Or Paramount could say “No, we already have a risqué teen comedy in development with that title.” Or Sony Pictures could say "Well, we have a movie called Bob Trapper, and that’s close enough. So, no.
It’s voluntarily binding for members, but not law, so you can resign from the Bureau and there’s no consequences except all your all titles are pretty much up for grabs now what with turnabout being fair play.
Earlier this year The Butler - even though it was based on a book with that title - almost had to be renamed because another studio owned a 1916 silent film with the same title.
So yeah, you can make a movie and release it as Pulp Fiction. But none of the big studios would.
There are still many cases where movies have the same title. Harlow was produced by two different studios and released within a month of each other. Monkey Business was both a Marx Brothers movie and a Cary Grant film (Paramount agreed to keep the Marx Brothers version out of release while the second film was out). There are three movies named Go West. Two named Crash – the Oscar winner and a David Cronenberg film, made only eight years apart.
Studios will veto movie titles is they can get confused with films currently in production, but once the film is released, they are more lenient. They probably figure the original film has run its course and a second film might increase video sales of the first for people who don’t know there are two.
I remember back say, in the early 90’s, going to the video store and fairly often seeing direct-to-video b-movies with identical titles to more famous movies, like “Fatal Attraction”, in an obvious attempt to mislead renters and cash in.
It’s still going strong. Our friends over at The Asylum Studio bring us gems such as Transmorphers: Fall of Man and Atlantic Rim at every possible opportunity!
It kind of did have to change its title. It is officially now Lee Daniels’ The Butler.
Here’s a 2005 Slate article with more information on the MPAA Title Registration Bureau, how it works, and some of the politics involved.
A lot of times when you see a title that has been used before, money changed hands or other favors were done. Here’s a 1997 LA Times article that covers some '90s history on title politics (such as Disney paying Sony $600,000 for permission to use Ransom as the title of the Mel Gibson movie).
And Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator has that title because he was unwilling to pay whatever fee was needed to get the rights to The Dictator.
IMDb.com has probably thousands of examples of identical titles. There was no justification for the action over The Butler that I could ever understand. The first movie was from 1916, is apparently unavailable, and before the Registration Bureau even existed. And to compound the irony, someone made a short film called The Butler also in 2013.
In the real world, there are only two legal principles involves, neither of them recognized as law.
Objecting leads to more returns than not objecting.
The Weinstein side is that the Butler title hassle was attempt by Warner Bros. to leverage Weinstein into giving up their piece of the Hobbit movies (Miramax used to own the rights and things got fuzzy when the movie grew from one to three films).
I assume the Warner Bros. side is that “wouldn’t we all kick Harvey Weinstein in the stomach if we had the chance?”
I don’t understand why this isn’t governed by the same system that seems to work with band names. I just can’t call my new group The Beatles, can I?
As for Movies, I only thought porn movies came up with titles that were close to an actual movie to rake in the profits. “Die Hard” becomes “Die Hard-on”, for example. I would think that a director or studio would not want their movie tainted with a low budget movie named the same thing for the off-chance that a few rental or purchasing mistakes are made.
Still, even though I understand it is voluntary, I would think that this wouldn’t even come up for movies made within say, 20 years of each other. A flap over something like “The Butler” makes little sense, since i can"t imagine a ton of people knew of the first version, but “The General” is a different story… Why would the owners of “The General” permit another movie to use that same name?
“The Beatles” is a trademark, used for branding music, videos and merchandise for sale. But you could release a track titled “Don’t Bother Me” and be in the clear, since copyright applies to the content of the work. (Though I’m sure they’d try to find a way to hassle you if you used one of the big hits’ titles.)
I guess I am a bit fuzzy on the Copyright - Trademark laws. I would think, for example, that Gone With The Wind is a trademark, since there is merchandise associated with the movie name. But it seems that the law distinguishes between a name of a movie or song vs. the production company/studio or band name that created the movie or music.
Is this statement correct? “Something with multiple parts, like The Godfather or Back To The Future can be protected, since there is more than one movie in the franchise.” Is this a correct interpretation of what has been said?
How about for a case like “The History of the World, Part I”. Seems to me that this name implied this was going to continue, but for whatever reason never did. Could I make “The History of the World, Part II” and have no legal or moral issues to deal with? Or would this fall under the “gentleman’s agreement” that someone explained upthread?
Copyright law protects expression. Titles are not part of expression. Trademark law protects the use of a trademark to generate revenue on specific products. The one-line takeaway is that confusion is not allowable. You can have Cadillac dogfood because nobody is likely to be confused into thinking that the car company makes dogfood. McDonalds can keep somebody from opening a McDonalds diner but can’t keep someone from titling a book I Hate McDonalds.
I don’t think so. Having multiple parts is completely irrelevant.
The proper issue is whether confusion would result. Since it probably would, the fact that Brooks didn’t make a part 2 is irrelevant.
In the real world, titles of everything - books, movies, songs, tv programs - get reused all the time. Business names get reused all the time - you can have a Mom’s Diner in every city in the country. But some things cannot be reused. The band fun had to change it’s name to fun. because there already existed a band with that name. The period made all the difference. Michael J. Fox (real middle name Andrew) had to add the middle initial because there was already an actor registered with the name Michael Fox. He could have named himself Michael A. Fox but didn’t. And now he can’t because another actor goes by the name of Michael A. Fox.
Intellectual property law is one of the most confusing areas of law. (And that’s saying a lot.) The rules don’t seem to make much sense from the outside. And it’s hard answering hypothetical questions because very little gets decided in court. You hire a good lawyer and do whatever you’re told.
Wasn’t it an early 80s tussle over the use of the word “Revenge” that led to the titles of the Star Trek and Star Wars movies released in 1982 and 1983? (Namely, *ST II: The Wrath of Khan *and SW Episode VI: Return of the Jedi…both were to have had “revenge” in their titles, and in the end, neither did.)
A friend was complaining about the film Crash when it was rented by some group he’s a member of - can’t remember if it was a church group, book discussion group, something like that. People weren’t pleased and they couldn’t believe it had received so many recommendations, nominations, and the like. After questioning him, I had to hold in my laughter as I explained that whoever picked up the film had selected not the lauded work examining race relations in the modern US, but rather the Cronenberg-directed piece on people getting turned on by car crashes, and that there should have been a little bit more double-checking beforehand.
