Wildly Different Movies With the Exact Same Title

There’s a lot that goes into crafting the perfect movie title. We’ve celebrated (and made fun of) plenty of notable titles at this very website over the years, cheering for the most evocative and creative and jeering at the dumbest. Choosing a great title is an important part of the filmmaking process — maybe even the most important, since it’ll be the audience’s first impression of the whole thing even before they see what it’s about and who’s in it and whether or not it has a post-credits scene at the end.

There are some titles so iconic it would be tough to use them a second time. There’s a reason there’s only one Citizen Kane out there, and no one’s made another movie called The Dark Knight (yet). When a movie sticks in the mind, it’s partially because of the title, and great movies tend to hold on to their titles so tightly it’s difficult to reuse them. Still, there are so many movies out there that it would be impossible for all of them to be called completely different things. In fact, there are a lot of movies — even famous ones — that share the exact same title with a completely different movie.

This is where we run into trouble while scrolling absentmindedly on the apps late at night. A movie we think we recognize catches our eye, but when we start watching it it turns out to be something much different, just with the same title. It’s a testament, really, to the versatility of language that the same word or phrase could be used to refer to such disparate stories. 1980s action creature features share the same name as modern documentaries, just as indie director debuts and rowdy studio sports comedies can be easily mixed up for the same reason. There’s even a famous director who copied the title of his own movie. So nice they used it twice. (Or three times … or five!)