“Tron” isn’t really about Tron.
Many movies are named after animals, but the animal is almost never the lead character, as per Jaws, Old Yeller, or Flowers for Algernon.
Captain Hook isn’t the main character in “Hook.”
The title character of the TV adaptation of The Man in the High Castle doesn’t show up until the second season, and he is never a lead character.
Maybe The Walking Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil and such like titles.
“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is not really about Sarah Marshall.
“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” does have Liberty Valance in it, but he’s not the lead.
I guess “The Godfather” sort of depends on who you think the word refers to. Is the titular character Vito or Michael Corleone?
I think The Walking Dead are those not yet zombies? Which would cover all the characters really. Except the zombies.
It’s common in monster movies, which are about people reacting to the monster. Thus The Thing from Another World, Them!, the Blob, Alien, Dr. Cyclops, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and others give the actual title character minimal screentime.
I think it was purposefully a play on the zombies being dead people that walk and the living being ‘dead men walking’.
Neither is the man who shot him . . . or is he?
He is. Stewart is listed first on the poster but Wayne is listed first nearly everywhere else.
Horror movies are sort of a weird case for this thread: the monsters both are and are not the main character. In terms of story structure, they’re not the main character, but they’re also 100% the reason people went to see those films. No one cares about the adventures of New Mexico State Trooper Sgt. Ben Peterson, they want to see giant ants eating people.
Really, how many lines of dialog did Bruce the shark get in Jaws?
We don’t see much of The Invisible Man
I’ll see myself out…
Several Bond movies qualify:
Goldfinger
The Man with the Golden Gun
Octopussy (I still can’t believe that’s an actual non-porn movie title)
Stretching the definition of “character”, Wanda doesn’t even have any lines in A Fish Called Wanda.
Essentially, the monsters are just McGuffins.
Dr. Strangelove doesn’t appear until well into the movie.
Not technically a character, but the Maltese Falcon doesn’t show up until nearly the end of the movie.
In the last episode of the first season of Andor it becomes apparent that the show is not necessarily named after Cassian.
I’ve remarked many times on this Board about Peter Shaffer’s plays, and about Amadeus in particular. Certainly Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart gets lots of stage time in the play and screen time in the movie. But Antonio Salieri is pretty clearly the Lead Character. We see the story through his eyes – more obviously in the play than in the film (where he tells the story as a sort-of confession to the priest, rather than tearing down that fourth wall and directly addressing the audience, as in the play).
So why isn’t it called Salieri?
(Aside from the fact that no one would go to see it. Before the play came out, how the hell many non-experts had even heard of Salieri?)
Or, more to the point, why Amadeus instead of Mozart?
Because, like so many of Shaffer’s plays, this isn’t really about the historical incident that inspired it, but about the relationship between Man and God. In the case of this play/movie, Salieri, who has devoted his life to being obedient to God and has (he thinks) been rewarded with musical talent and ability, learns that the puerile, vulgar, selfish, and utterly undeserving Mozart has been granted musical talent light years beyond his own, and feels that God has broken their bargain. So he wages war against God, discarding all his pious activities and doing everything in his power to destroy Mozart – waging war against God with Mozart as the battlefield. This is a lot clearer in the play than in the film (for instance, Salieri, upon learning that Mozart is not impoverished by Salieri’s efforts because the Freemasons are supporting him, convinces Mozart to use a thinly-disguised version of Freemasonry in The Magic Flute. The Masons, convinced Mozart has betrayed the secrets of the society, withdraw their support, and Mozart falls into poverty. This is pretty much glossed over in the film).
Shaffer wasn’t setting out to write a historically accurate account of the interaction between Mozart and Salieri, but to write an allegorical work using that historical incident as a scaffold for his drama. Don’t go to see Amadeus hoping to see history, just as you shouldn’t try to learn about Pizzaro and Atahuallpa frrom The Royal Hunt of the Sun, or about a grotesque real-life incident in England from Equus.
It’s called “Amadeus” because that famous middle name means “Love of God”, usually interpreted as “beloved by God”. His original middle name was Gottlieb, which is the same thing in German. Mozart was beloved by God, Salieri felt, to an absurd degree for one so undeserving.
In the movie The Sure Thing Nicolette Sheridan’s character is credited as The Sure Thing and she appears only in the final scenes of the movie.
The bomb shows up pretty late too!
The Princess Bride
Buttercup is maybe the 3rd or 4th lead. 5th? 6th?