Airplane! is supposed to sound like a disaster movie, such as Airport 75; it’s a parody of those movies.
And don’t call me Shirley.
Waking Ned was renamed Waking Ned Devine, did that make it sound more Irish? I can imagine the simplest renaming would be something like The Irish Guard. It would sound tautological here but might clue in some Americans as to the subject matter and that Irish dollar, it’s a pretty good dollar. 
It didn’t make a lot of sense, other than perhaps that airplane is a childish sort of word. Which actually would have been a reasonable choice given the silliness of the film.
My favorite example of this is When the Raven Flies (1984) - IMDb
Icelandic title:Hrafninn flýgur
UK title: When the Raven Flies
US title: Revenge of the Barbarians.
I suspect that the US distributors were trying to piggyback on the popularity of Conan the Barbarian, which had been released two years earlier.
(It’s a pretty good film, by the way. Basically Yojimbo or A Fistful of Dollars, but with Vikings.)
I have no idea why Waking Ned was renamed Waking Ned Devine. I can’t imagine that it sounds to an American more like an Irish title for a movie. I can’t think of any reason that someone might rename the film in that way, except that perhaps the distributor just thought that three-word names were better than two-word names. That doesn’t make much sense, but then many of the cases of renaming don’t make any sense. Many of the original names of films don’t make any sense either.
I can’t think of any case where the renaming of a film for the American audience consisted of inserting the name of the country (or the adjective for the country) into the name of the film, so it doesn’t seem to me that the name The Irish Guard would be any better than The Guard. In one sense, it would actually be worse. In cases where a movie gets renamed for American audiences, names for which it’s blatantly clear that the name was changed would annoy some of the intended audience. Some of the audience would say, “Obviously this film wasn’t called The Irish Guard in Ireland. Why did they change it from The Guard? Do the distributors think we’re too stupid to know that it’s set in Ireland?”
I don’t know of any way to figure out if the distributors considered many other names for a film and decided eventually to keep the original name or if they didn’t ever consider other names and kept the original name because they didn’t want to change it.
Probably someone from marketing. The first film was a success, so they figured that if the audience recognise something as a Goldie Hawn film they will go see it.
True. It was first released as Producenterna, but it was no hit. When they changed the title it was a great success. At first Mel Brooks liked the concept of all his films were called Springtime for … (for the same reason as with Goldie Hawn, easy recognition), but eventually he got totally fed up with it, I understand.
I’d like to add that Swedish film importers some times come up the most horrible film titles, e.g. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is called Monty Pythons galna värld (The Crazy World of Month Python), a title the we aficionados will not touch with a ten foot pole.
One other good (or bad) example is one of my favourite films Breaking Away, which really is about breaking away from the peloton in a bicycle race. In Sweden it was called Loppet är kört (The race is over), which has the connotation of “it’s all over now, there’s nothing to look forward to”.
That number was 3.
Russia, Ukraine and South Korea.
Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration was adapted into a film with Jonathan Price and Jonny Lee Miller. In the UK it was titled “Regeneration.” In the US it was titled “Behind the Lines.”
But the weird thing is, I saw it in the US, in a US movie theater, with the title “Regeneration.” That was how it was advertised, and that was how the title appeared in the opening sequence. So sometime between its US theater release and its release onto video, the title got changed.
It also got edited, for reasons I can’t fathom. I own the US VHS, and I have seen the UK import VHS conversion, and the US version has cut a number of little moments out of scenes all throughout the movie. It’s irritating.
To be fair, the English title doesn’t make much sense either. Would you describe Blondie as being particularly Good, or Tuco as being especially Ugly? (I would say that Angel Eyes is pretty Bad, though). And the name doesn’t fit the “dollars” pattern of the previous two. I’ve always thought it should have been called “A Grave Full Of Dollars.”
As for 2 vs 3 main characters, I can see a case for it. Angel Eyes is seen at the start of the film, vanishes for a long period, and reappears in the middle, disappears again, and comes back for the climax. I can certainly see a case for Blondie and Tuco as the two main characters, with angel eyes as the antagonist.
The renaming of movies in different countries is only one part of the messy business of naming films. A novel will be called T. In country A, where the movie of it is first released, it is called U. When it’s distributed in country B, it is called V. When it is released to DVD in country A, it is called W. When it is re-released years later in country A, it is called X. When it is shown on network television in country A, it is called Y. When it is released in country C, where the language isn’t the same, it is called Z, which happens to be the name U first used for the film plus a subtitle in the language of that country. And so forth. (Here, A, B, and C are countries and W through Z are titles for the movie or novel.)
Really, it’s hopeless to try to understand all the changes that titles go through. The distributors think that they know what title would sell best, but sometimes it’s obvious that they have no idea what they’re doing. The IMDb does its best to track these title changes, but even they get confused. Here’s what they say about Regeneration:
In Japan, there are various ways film titles are adjusted/changed for better understanding:
There are the titles that are kept the same but modified to fit Japanese pronunciation:
Rocky
ロッキー
“Rokkii”
Titanic
タイタニック
“Taitanikku”
Others are directly translated:
East of Eden
東のエデン
“Eden no higashi”
The Fugitive
逃亡者
“Toubousha”
Some have certain words removed or completely changed into another English title:
Pirates of the Carribean
パイレーツ・オブ・カリビアン
“Pirates of Caribbean”
The Fast and the Furious
ワイルドスピード
“Wild Speed”
One of my favorites is this one. Apparently, “not forgetting” is more heartwarming than “remembering.”
Remember the Titans
タイタンズを忘れない
“Taitans wo wasurenai”
(Don’t Forget the Titans)
And, if it involves romance or love, it’s often included in the changed title:
**Out of Africa **
愛と悲しみの果て
“Ai to kanashimi no hate”
(The end of love and sorrow)
An Officer and A Gentleman
愛と青春の旅立ち
“Ai to seishun no tabidachi”
(The departure of love and youth)
**The Fabulous Baker Boys **
恋の行方
“Koi no yukue”
(The place love has gone)
As Good As It Gets
恋愛小説家
“Renai shousetsuka”
(A romance novel writer)
Shouldn’t we also mention Män som hatar kvinnor the got changed to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I generally understand the motivation of these changes – get around odd references, tweak for cultural tastes, etc.
The oddest one I ever saw was the Irish tearjerker “Inside I’m Dancing.” In the US, it was retitled “Rory O’Shea Was Here.”
The former title is catchy, enigmatic, and perfectly encapsulates the general feeling of the movie (which is about a vivacious young man trying to find an identity despite suffering from ALS).
The latter is clumsy, forgettable, doesn’t even hint at the emotional content of the movie, runs completely against American tastes, and is a spoiler.
Inside I’m Dancing is a great title, and again, WTF? 
Unless there was a similarly titled film released around the same time?
Mad Max here got changed to Road Warrior in the US, no real idea why.
Evil Angels got changed to** A Cry in the Dark** , allegedly because they feared it would sound like a biker movie.
Crocodile Dundee got changed to “Crocodile” Dundee , allegedly because they feared it would sound like a wildlife movie.
To be precise, it was Mad Max 2 that was released as The Road Warrior in the U.S., not Mad Max (the first film).
A Yahoo! search for [“Philosopher’s Stone” AND Merlin] yields 52 pages of results. Granted, most of them are connected to the BBC Merlin series or to Harry Potter fanfic, but I’m not the first to make the connection. And according to Wiki, “Mention of the philosopher’s stone in writing can be found as far back as Cheirokmeta by Zosimos of Panopolis (c. 300 A.D.).”
Do you like renaming gladiator movies?
Dawn of the Dead (the original) was renamed Zombie (or Zombi, it’s inconsistent) some places. A whole bunch of unrelated movies got tagged as sequels to it. Zombie 2 is fairly notable in its own right with a few scenes like a zombie fighting a shark. I think the last one was about killer birds or something (I’ve never seen any of them but Zombie 2).
But the strangest of all, IMO, is Brazil renaming Teen Wolf “O Garoto do Futuro”, (The Boy of the Future), trying to play it off as a sequel to Back to the Future.
This is an interesting one, because the Swedish title (Men Who Hate Women) captures the darkness of the themes, while the English title seems to be purely going for a ‘sexy’ feel, and also to fit in with the other titles, I suppose.