Am I being whooshed here? Working Girl, was a very famous mid-1980s movie starring Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, and Sigourney Weaver, and directed by Mike Nichols.
And it appears in an IMDB search before the Sandra Bullock sitcom, which was spun off from it.
And then there was 1968’s Madigan, a gritty police story starring Richard Widmark, and Elvira Madigan, a 1967 Swedish artsy-fartsy lush romantic movie which one critic, I believe it was in Time, called one of the most beautiful films ever made. (There is also a 1943 version of the Swedish movie.)
Rumour has it that American Beauty did well at the box office, in part because many of the audience thought they were going to see American Pie.
True story - I wanted to rent the video of Double Jeopardy (hey, i’d seen the trailers, it looked an interesting premise.)
I actually got a totally different movie which I don’t remember. Maybe this one or this one. Whichever one, so boring that I only remember it because of the name, and not a single detail of the plot.
The Professional, starring Jean Reno and Natalie Portman, came out only a few months after The Specialist, an unbearably bad movie starring Sly Stallone.
One year I eagerly set up the video recorder to capture Genesis II, a science-fiction program from the seventies with this cool transcontinetal subway. Imagine my disappointment when I reviewed the recording to discover an informercial for Genesis II, the hair restoration product…
And Melanie Griffith won an Oscar for her performance.
My two examples are Parenthood and Father Hood. I actually did get these confused one time. Really enjoyed the former, then later picked up the latter one time thinking it was the former.