Why do films sometimes have different names in different parts of the English speaking world?

Cafe Society
1

I did a search and couldn’t find anything, but this must have come up before. I kinda half-suspect I may have even asked this before but I don’t recall any conclusive answer if I did.

I just noticed in the current January Jones thread that the British film The Boat That Rocked was called Pirate Radio in the US.

I’ve noticed a few others in the past, although it seems to be rarer nowadays, but I’ve always wondered why films are renamed in other parts of the English speaking world.

Off the top of my head I also recall Adventures In Babysitting/Night On The Town and Prêt-à-Porter/Ready To Wear. Changing a non-English language title to English must be common enough but why are Anglophone films renamed? Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle was Harold and Kumar Get The Munchies here. When I first heard the original film title I didn’t know it was a fastfood chain, it seemed alluringly cryptic as a film title, but the new name tells you anything you could possibly want to know about the film without seeing it.

2

You answered your own question. Because people in other parts of the world don’t know what White Castle is.

3

Right, but in my opinion the second title is weaker. Also, with internetty globalisation etc. people will have heard of the film coming out in the US then it has a different title here, it seems like bad marketing, even if awareness of something like White Castle is low in Britain or Ireland. Plus that’s only one of the titles. Do people in Britain not know what babysitting is?

4

In the old days, titles were changed because the producers didn’t think a US audience would understand a British title. They also changed to make things sound like there was more action, or to remove subtle jokes for things far more obvious (e.g., Tight Little Island was changed to Whiskey Galore for the US). The same thing happened when exporting a film to the UK: the British distributors would change things so that people would understand the reference.

It’s done less often nowadays, but there are still references that need to be changed from time to time.

5

I think you mean Whisky Galore was changed to Tight Little Island for the US release. Looking it up, it seems there was a prohibition on using alcoholic drinks in film titles in the US at the time.

6

“The Philosopher’s Stone” is a well-understood reference in the UK, but not something American kids would pony up their allowance to see, hence “The Sorcerer’s Stone.” You’re well-versed in Arthurian legend; we’re well-versed in Disney cartoons. One has more snob appeal than the other, but really, they are culturally equivalent.

7

That change was implemented when the books were being published though.
Slightly OT but: I dunno how many Irish kids are well versed in Arthurian legend but I suppose we’re too small a market to care about. Also what has the philosopher’s stone go to do with Arthurian legend, I didn’t know those two things were related?

8

Yes, what? The earliest ref on wiki’s page about the philosopher’s stone was during the 8th century, two hundred years after king Arthur’s supposed time frame.

9

Krokodil writes:

> “The Philosopher’s Stone” is a well-understood reference in the UK, but not
> something American kids would pony up their allowance to see, hence “The
> Sorcerer’s Stone.” You’re well-versed in Arthurian legend; we’re well-versed in
> Disney cartoons. One has more snob appeal than the other, but really, they are
> culturally equivalent.

We’ve discussed this several times in threads about the Harry Potter books. There isn’t any evidence that British children know any more about the Philosopher’s Stone than American kids do. It was the American publisher’s choice and nothing else to change the name. They changed it because they felt like changing it. They didn’t do any research into what American children knew about the subject.

10

I’m the second to say it, but I don’t think American kids know more or less about Philosopher’s stones than British kids.

11

I hadn’t thought about it but the answer to my question, when it’s not a clear case that there’s a cultural reason might be as simple that some executive presumes that the original title is too cryptic for the non-local audience, without actually knowing whether it is.

I was interested to hear that a recent Irish film, The Guard, didn’t have its name changed on release abroad. Here the title clearly means “The Cop/Policeman” which many in Britain probably would know but I’m not too sure if too many Americans would get it?

12

The 1989 James Bond film “Licence to Kill” (note the British spelling of “Licence”) had the working title of “Licence Revoked”. At that time, the story was that the title was changed because the producers feared that too many Americans wouldn’t know what the word “Revoked” meant. :smiley:

13

Possibly fewer than if it was Garda, which we know as an armored truck company. I was less surprised that it also means police (armored truck –> police isn’t a huge leap) than what language the word is from. Once I confirmed it wasn’t Spanish, my next guess was Italian given there’s a place called that in Italy.

14

I suspect that the name The Guard didn’t get changed just because the American distributor couldn’t think of any better name. Distributors aren’t marketing geniuses who do extensive surveys for each film to determine the best name to distribute it under. They’re just movie executives who make a guess, sometimes correctly and sometimes wrongly, each time they acquire a new film on the best title to sell it by.

15

That seems to be the most popular version of the story, but I’ve read another: that Americans know as well as anyone what the word “revoked” means, but the producers discovered that, when put in conjunction with the word “licence” (however spelled) a significant number of them strongly associated it with the DMV, and that the title was therefore not conveying the hoped-for mental images of thrills and glamour in exotic locales.

16

I get very confused by how they decide to do this in Sweden. For a start, all but young kids have pretty good abilities in English anyway, but still some things get translated and some don’t. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason. Take what’s on at FS Sergel, a largish central Stockholm cinema right now:

http://www.sf.se/bio/Booking?cmd=listFilms&ft2=theatre&fv2=93

Well, just taking a few (cutting out Swedish films and kid’s films, like Cars 2/Bilar 2 that seeing as it is dubbed it seems quite sane to have a Swedish title)

Apornas planet: (R)evolution
Bridesmaids
Captain America - The First Avenger
Conan the Barbarian 3D
Cowboys and Aliens
Final Destination 5 3D
Friends with Benefits
Harry Potter och dödsrel…del2
Horrible Bosses
Midnatt i Paris
Source Code
The Zookeeper

So, Planet of the Apes and Midnight in Paris, both targeted towards non-children, get translated titles, but the likes of Friends with Benefits and Horrible Bosses do not.

No idea why.

The king though is this fella:

Pirates of the Caribbean: I främmande farvatten

Yes, they translated the subtitle, but left the main bit untranslated.

And sometimes they just do weird shit with the titles. Apparently in the 70s and 80s every Goldie Hawn film got renamed to (translated) “The girl that …” so you get:

Tjejen som föll överbord (The Girl that fell overboard - Overboard)
Tjejen som gjorde lumpen (The Girl that did National Service - Private Benjamin)
Tjejen som tog hem spelet (The Girl that, shit, literally “took home the game” but I am sure that can be translated a trifle better than that - Wildcats)
… and so on

Who on earth thought that was a good idea?

17

Same thing in France, where movies with Leslie Nielsen for example, were all titled “Y a t’il un… pour…” - “Is there a…”

Airplane - Y a t’il un pilote dans l’avion (Is there a pilot on in the plane)
Naked Gun - Y a t’il un flic pour sauver Hollywood (I think it was)

You sometimes end up with a title that’s as long as the movie.

A little stranger are cases where the original US title is replaced with a different English language title. For a recent example : “The Hangover” was released as “Very Bad Trip.” Admittedly, French speakers are more likely to be familiar with the English “bad trip” than English “hangover”, but why not just use a French title, or subtitle it ?

18

Happens with video games, too. “Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars” became, in America, “Broken Sword: Circle of Blood”.

The first mention of Arthur wasn’t until Nennius in the ninth century.

But I’m not aware of any Arthur/Philosophers’ Stone connection.

19

It seems random. In the Netherlands, we go by the original title in English. Those are not translated in the movie and TV -guides. No transaltion on the DVD boxes, either.

Then you have our neighbouring Germans, who speak English almost as good as we do. (The main difference is that they dub all non-German movies, while we subtitle them). They translate movie titles wildly, in all directions, no method or system to it. If I look up a movie on the German part of my TV guide, it is anyones guess what movie they actually mean.

20

Planet of the Apes is an old franchise, so consistency was probable a contributing factor in that particular case.

They did the same thing with movies directed by Mel Brooks, many of them got the titles changed to ‘Det våras för…’(Springtime for…), I have no idea why or how it how it got started.

Then we have Equilibrium which got changed to Cubic, which I can sort of understand since a lot of Swedes would have trouble pronouncing the original title, but if you’re going to change it, why not change it into something in Swedish ? :confused: