While the 1995 Japanese anime series, Neon Genesis Evangelion revolves around human-shaped weapons called "Evangelions", the "Neon Genesis" part of the title is neither part of the original Japanese name, nor its direct translation. The Japanese name is 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン / Shin-seiki evangerion, "Evangelion of a new era/century". The series has other non-direct translations too, and apparently this style was approved of the original creators, but it was always a bit of a mystery whether the gap in the interpretation was intentional or not.
However, over two decades later, with the re-boot movie series Rebuild of Evangelion, in the final scenes of the final movie, the protagonist name-drops the words "neon genesis" in appropriate context. I've never grinned as hard in movie theater.
Neon is relating to "new" via neo- prefix, with -n added on because the Western idea in the 90s of Japanese aesthetic was futuristic neon.
Genesis is for as beginning to the new era. It's etymology is Greek for "origin, creation, generation" which is a sort of an "era". Plus a looser translation provides the extra wordplay and thematic heft with the Angels due to Genesis being first book of the Bible.
Not a translator but I write a lot of poetry, and that's what would be going through my mind as I see the difference between the literal translation and the English decision and the additional capabilities this translation gives. In my mind, the initial translator 100% intended this "gap", which is less a gap and more of an additional layering.
They're both ancient Greek, but different grammatical genders: neon (νέον) is neuter, while γένεσις is feminine. Better might have been "nea genesis" if those two words were to be interpreted together. But, "evangelion" (εὐαγγέλιον) is also Greek and neuter, meaning the gospel, good news, or a reward owed a messenger for his good news. I always figured the "new" of "neon" belonged with the "evangelion," and "genesis" was just kind of hanging around for no particular reason.
BTW neon the gas was called so because it was a new discovery (in a well-searched area, the composition of air). The name basically means "a new something", neuter gender, could be "lo nuevo" in Spanish or "das neue" in German.
Since "evangelion" and "genesis" clearly are taken from Greek, so was apparently "neon".
Intentionality matters. "It" should not count as a title drop. Nor Barbie (or any movie where the title is the characters name). But I understand it would be way more difficult to run the numbers with such a constraint. But this is a case where, to me, the results are very much tainted and thus I had to stop reading. To me this is like when developers run into a hard issue and somehow play a game of semantics with the wording of a ticket to avoid putting together something useful for the user
As noted by other commenters, the author addresses this, although I would have loved to have had a version of all the _statistics_ with name-based drops elided.
I think a case could be made for “It” being a quasi-name and therefore a different word that is spelled the same or, because “it” is a pronoun it only counts when it is used to refer to the thing that the title itself refers to.
While it is somewhat arbitrary, I am sure that "Barbie" is intentional, the somewhat obnoxious repetition of the word "Barbie" fits the theme. Also, maybe you stopped reading a little too early as the case where the title is a character name is specially addressed.
"It" may be the the special case here, as it is a very common word by itself but that a movie is named like this is notable enough for it to be included.
It's possible there are just more lines of dialogue in Barbie than It, given the conventions around each genre. I haven't seen It, but I can assume with It being a horror film there are longer periods with no dialogue for suspense etc.
Barbie also has multiple characters named Barbie; There are times where Barbie is said three or four times in a single paragraph and even a sequence that's just a complete graph of Barbies saying "Hi Barbie" to each other.
Have you stopped scrolling once you realized that? The article acknowledges that, and even has a special category of movies named after characters with just a single title drop.
That said, Barbie is a funny case indeed, as it's named after about half of its characters :P
Yes, but it would've been much more interesting to read about title drops where this is not the case. The top titledrops listed that are not names of a character are all names of something else, like locations or objects.
I agree, I think this analysis can benefit from some data sanitisation.
It is a silly one to include, because the word it is picked up by their analysis. Need to remove all hits except where the characters are referencing Pennywise directly.
I also noticed that in some cases a namedrop was registered where the eponymous character speaks, e.g. ALIENS: hisses. These need to be removed as well.
Movies where the name of the movie is the name of the leading character needs to be removed as well, or at least filterable from the list.
All of this makes the site a little less interesting imo. A good title drop in a movie is a fun little easter egg, especially if the name a bit more conceptual, e.g. The Phantom Menace. The way this site is set up at the moment makes it a bit more difficult to find those really good title drops.
This seems like something that could be handled easily with a second-pass on the data using an LLM. And the author has made the dataset available... [0]
Exactly. If they had limited it to cases where "it" is referring to Pennywise, that would be one thing, but not when anyone uses a very common pronoun!
I guess this is the downside of making a data analysis thing as a side project to hopefully get something going, but not having the time to take care of all potential edge cases.
I guess "Them!" is also affected by this, and maybe The Thing or The Birds...
To be fair, the article starts out seeming real for about the first third. It's only after the first list — Barbie, Damini, Sita,... Azhar, It — that it descends into obvious parody. Quote:
"What's interesting about the (Fiction) list here is that it's pretty international: only two of the top ten movies come from Hollywood, 6 are from India, one from Indonesia and one from Turkey. So it's definitely an international phenomenon."
Here the writer slides seamlessly from talking about movies with title drops to talking about movies with single-word titles which are also the name of the main character, but is still saying things like "What's interesting about this list..." and "...an international phenomenon," as if those are remotely the defining characteristics of the list he just gave. (The defining characteristic, again, is "movies named after the protagonist." That's all.)
Then there's a section break. Since the article clearly outed itself as parody right before the break, I think it's totally reasonable for anyone to stop reading it at that point. (Although maybe not 100% reasonable to come back and comment on HN about it, except maybe to express disappointment and save other people the bother of reading that far themselves.)
Anyway, after the break the author says, "You might have noticed [an icon on each movie that is] named after one of its characters." But scroll back up and you'll see that icon is missing from 4 of the movies in that list of 10: "Saina", "Nussa", "Arif v. 216", and "It". Of those 4, 3 are clearly named after a main character. The fourth (like "Ecks vs. Sever") is named after two characters (Arif and 216) but the graph shows that the author is counting instances of the name "Arif" alone, not instances of the phrase "Arif v 216".
So not only is the article trying to be funny, it's not even playing by consistent rules — it's a parody of an academic paper but also just flat-out lying about the data! That's not only annoying but uncool.
I would actually be interested in reading a real article on the phenomenon of title drops in movies, e.g. by someone who'd gone through a bunch of movies and tallied which of them contain title drops. But the linked article is just garbage.
I'm imagining some film school student explaining how Barbie would have been a better movie, a real film even, without mentioning the character's name.
Indeed, and this contaminates all other analyses as well. Sure, shorter titles are dropped more frequently – but that sounds like it could be just because character names tend to make for short titles.
How sure are we that these so-called title drops are what this article purports them to be rather than the name of the film coming from the content and/or dialogue that is contained within it?
An analogy: when someone writes a song and then they need to name it, they will frequently choose a word or phrase that appears in the lyrics. When Leonard Cohen sings “hallelujah” in the song of the same name, is that a “title drop”? I assume not.
> How sure are we that these so-called title drops are what this article purports them to be
What does the article purport them to be? Right at the top I see:
> A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in.
That makes no distinction if the title or the script came first. The article does call out movies who do that in a cringe or obvious way (like Suicide Squad, which had prior art) but also includes movies where that is unavoidable, such as Barbie.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter which came first. As soon as you make a line and a title the same, the line becomes a title drop. The audience sees the final product, not the process.
> An analogy
That analogy doesn’t work. Songs are typically repetitive and a few minutes long. Everyone expects them to name the title. A movie, on the other hand, is an experience that asks suspension of disbelief from you, it tries to engross you in its world over the course of multiple hours. When a character title drops, in a second you’re suddenly and forcefully pulled back from the illusion and reminded you’re watching a movie.
> What does the article purport them to be? Right at the top I see:
It seems to imply a concerted effort to mention the title of the movie in the script in a meta, fourth wall breaking sort of way.
In some cases that's obviously true - Hot Tub Time Machine, Suicide Squad from their examples - but other times an untitled script just needs a title and it's plucked from the script.
I think there's a distinction there, because the latter is less of an Easter Egg sort of thing and more "ok now we need a title."
> It seems to imply a concerted effort to mention the title of the movie in the script in a meta, fourth wall breaking sort of way.
It makes zero difference to the movie watching experience if the script line came from the script or the other way around. While you’re watching the movie, the effect is exactly the same. So even if you took a line of dialog to make your title, it becomes a title drop nonetheless because the audience doesn’t know (nor should they care) which came first.
> It makes zero difference to the movie watching experience if the script line came from the script or the other way around. While you’re watching the movie, the effect is exactly the same.
Certainly not true in the case of a work adapted from another source like a novel. The words "The Fellowship of the Ring" are never uttered in The Fellowship of the Ring, and Peter Jackson's ham-fisted insert there was obvious even to people who hadn't read it, but especially to those of us who have.
And, by that token, if the dialogue suddenly seems awkward and stunted for no other reason than to insert the title, most people would probably conclude that the title came first.
> It makes zero difference to the movie watching experience if the script line came from the script or the other way around.
I disagree; if it's a quote that serves the narrative and isn't jammed in as a reference it doesn't have the same effect as the meta examples. Less of a fourth wall break.
That’s just called good writing. You could decide on a title first then skilfully add it as a quote that servers the narrative. Again, as an audience member you don’t know¹, except when it’s glaringly bad. It’s the toupée fallacy.
¹ I hope it’s obvious I’m excluding cases where someone deliberately seeks behind-the-scenes information. We’re talking about having only the result of the work as context.
It’s like anything in film. The viewer can speculate how it was constructed based on evidence in the work itself. The writing divide is certainly not the only source of evidence.
More generally we are not limited only to the film when trying to categorize based on this distinction. The distinction exists even if it is not always discernible.
That said, I think trying to construct separate lists based on this distinction would be nearly impossible.
> Unsurprisingly, movies named after one of their characters have an average of 24.7 title drops, more than twice as much as the usual 10.3.
And this thread started exactly with the point of what the article considers title drops.
The article also highlights the interesting case of “movies named after a character with single title drops”. I’m willing to bet that in those movies, if the name is proffered late enough in the runtime, it may feel like a title drop because the the audience suddenly becomes aware the name had never been said before. When the name is said all the time or once but too early (so you’ll be primed to expect it more often) then the effect is bound to be lessened.
My favorite "title drop" in a song is in How Soon is Now by the Smiths. After an instrumental break, Morrissey sings, "You say it's gonna happen now? What exactly do you mean..." You can almost hear the next line should be "How soon is now" but there's a pause and then he sings, "See I've already waited too long..." The title captures the mood of the song but is never actually said. It feels intentionally left out.
On the movie front, No Country for Old Men does something similar.
> So for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring either "Lord of the Rings" or "Fellowship of the Ring" would count as title drops (feel free to hover over the visualizations to explore the matches)!
An unacknowledged partial title drop for that movie is that "Lord of the Ring" (with no s at the end) is uttered.
Sauron is twice called the Lord of the Rings in book two.
In chapter one, Many Meetings, Gandalf tells Frodo:
> Yes, I knew of them. Indeed I spoke of them once to you; for the Black Riders are the Ringwraiths, the Nine Servants of the Lord of the Rings.
And in chapter two, The Council of Elrond, Glorfindel says:
> And even if we could, soon or late the Lord of the Rings would learn of its hiding place and would bend all his power towards it.
In the final chapter (The Grey Havens) of book six, the Red Book is also titled by Frodo “THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING”. Now there’s a title drop.
(Just in case it’s not obvious: I’m talking about the books here, not the movies. Never seen ’em.)
I don't have my Fellowship at hand now, but doesn't Frodo joke near the beginning he's "the lord of the rings" and Gandalf scolds him by telling him something like "there's only one lord of the rings"?
Found the quote by googling, he was scolding Pippin, not Frodo, and it was "Ring" singular after all:
> "Hurray!" cried Pippin, springing up. "Here is our noble cousin! Make way for Frodo, Lord of the Ring!"
> "Hush!" said Gandalf from the shadows at the back of the porch. "Evil things do not come into this valley; but all the same we should not name them. The Lord of the Ring is not Frodo, but the master of the Dark Tower of Mordor, whose power is again stretching out over the world!"
Sauron is referred to as the Lord of the Ring and the Lord of the Rings (second being much more common) multiple times.
The Ring is referred to as The Ring, The One Ring, The Ruling Ring, and a few other things, but I do not think it is ever referred to as the "Lord" of anything.
While you're right about Sauron being the Lord of the Rings, he didn't make all of them.
The three Elven rings were made in secret by Elves, and were untainted by Sauron. Disregard the TV show, which shows a version contradicting Tolkien.
This is the reason at the end of the Return of the King, with Sauron defeated, Gandalf, Galadriel and (Cirdan?) are able to openly wear the three again. Had they been tools of the Enemy, they would never have been worn again.
They even included one in the article. At least I sincerely doubt that "The Scarlet Bond That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime" [sic] was dialogue. Given the context I'm fairly sure it's just the title showing up on screen, but subtitled because it's in Japanese.
How about movies where the title drop is the very last line? I can only think of one (it's not really a spoiler, but SPOILERS I guess).
The last line of My Dinner with Andre is "my dinner with Andre." I think that only works because the whole movie feels like a stage play, and there's something very stagey about that choice.
> Similarly, movies named after a protagonist have a title drop rate of 88.5% while only 34.2% of other movies drop their titles.
What is much more interesting is that 11.5% of movies named after their protagonist never mention them by name. I guess I can imagine a few edge cases where this would be usual (protagonists not usually called by their name due to their position, like kings, and movies with little talking), but it's surprising that there are that many.
I was utterly disturbed by a story sent into the Kermode and Mayo radio show many years ago. The listener explained that their family went to the theatre, sat down in their seats to watch the film, and then upon the first utterance of the title of the film they would clap, stand up, and walk out.
I assume this to be a joke. I've never found any reference of anybody doing this online, or anybody even discussing this one story from the show. But holy shit does it make my skin crawl.
Maybe I was (un)lucky, but the only film I've checked was "Inception". It's spoken at 19:24, but the explorer states the title is not dropped at all. I had to actually look it up, as I've doubted my memory for a second.
Wild, that was the first title I tried as well.
It is such a specific word, hence why I tried it first.
It's actually said eight times in the movie (I ctrl+f'd an .srt file).
The page mentions the methodology was to use opensubtitles.com, but not how which specific version was to be used from that website was chosen (because opensusbtitles.com lists tons of possible files for each language depending on what version of torrent/etc they match). It is possible that the download script used accidentally chose non-English .srt files sometimes for some films.
Just dropping in to say thank you! Fun read, fun idea, well executed.
Smells like the old internet!
Runpee.com for when best to pee during a long film, Mr Skin for nude scenes (Flesh of The Stars in Knocked up fiction) … and titledrops.net for title drops.
What a fun read! I should point out though that the movie Saina definitely needs a "name" icon next to it, as it's a biopic of badminton player Saina Nehwal.
(It's a shame there's no nice way on Twitter to sort by number of favorites. You can approximate it by searching for "from:<accountname> min_faves:<number>", but it doesn't correct for the number of followers the person had at a given point. Which is a problem with subreddit "top" sorting, come to think of it, as it strongly weights recent posts when the subreddit was more popular. Always wished they'd fix that.)
Yes, it's a game, but from one of two series that cemented video games as a cinematic medium, when developers so desire. 35 years of build-up, and a love letter to the whole series, including (especially) the ones people derided (FNC). Also, interesting because it's not a direct quote of the title, but still something that everyone who got to this point recognized immediately.
Hmmm... I nominate Mortal Kombat (1995) for the cringiest title drops. Instead of being used once for a climatic fight scene, they keep dropping it over and over (10 times according to the article).
Deathstalker 2 is probably my favorite instance of a sequel number being incorporated into the title drop. Not only is it one of the first lines of the movie, the timing is impeccable.
Robocop 2 is a critique of sequels - everything must be bigger and better, designed by committee, with every idea (directive) shoved into the box until it becomes unworkable.
Does this not take in to account lyrics in musical movies? I looked up Across the Universe and it reported zero name drops despite there being at least a dozen.
One thing they deem to be a movie “sin” is the fact that movies will often have a line of dialogue in which they'll say the title of the movie. Whenever a movie does this, the CinemaSins Narrator will exclaim “Roll Credits,” as though the title of the film can only be mentioned in the absolute last line of dialogue.
The Elephant (2003) has my favorite Title drop, and of course, is not marked in this database. As I remember it, at some point in the movie we are shown a drawing of an elephant randomly hanging in the room of one of the protagonists. Both the drawing, and the main protagonists are easy to ignore, yet are the main subjects of the movie.
Some movies have a working title and the release is different. We may never know how many title drops are in those. Although we know that the working title for "The Dark Knight" was "Rory's First Kiss".
The working title of the project is often public, e.g. on signs to the location shoot, and as such is often cryptic so that that the casual observer won't know that e.g. "Rory's First Kiss" is a Batman movie.
There was an Instagram account or YouTube channel that used to make funny videos of the films ending with the credits rolling at the exact point the title of the film was said—anyone have any recollection of that?
A bug: In "Highest title drops by decade", 1960, "Best rated (at least 1 drop)", it lists Psycho with 0 drops. It really does seem to be 0, so shouldn't show up here.
A different bug in the article: It lists That Time I Got Reincarnated… (awfully long title) as having one, but I'm pretty sure that's just a translation of the title card:
73
00:13:32,095 --> 00:13:34,055
No... Look!
74
00:13:47,068 --> 00:13:47,600
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
75
00:13:47,610 --> 00:13:49,987
<b>The Scarlet Bond</b>
<b>That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime</b>
76
00:14:04,627 --> 00:14:05,992
Find him?!
Reminded me of a scene in Barry¹ where the title character gets a small part in a movie and while his washed-up teacher is reviewing the script he sees Barry’s single line of dialogue and exclaims “That’s the name of the movie! They can’t cut that!”
> Chachi: "Look, this is not the first time I’ve been brought in to replace Barry Zuckerman. I think I can do for you everything he did, plus skew younger…"
> Narrator: "No one was making fun of Andy Griffith. I can't emphasize that enough."
I would've liked 2d charts or at least stacked bar charts for the correlation ones to see if the correlations are different for ones with only one drop or many drops
“A View to a Kill (1985)” The database does not recognise when the movie name is spoken by 2 people. In this movie 1 character begins the sentence “what a view…” and a 2nd character completes the line: “…to a kill”.
Happy to see Damini movie in that list. It's an excellent Bollywood movie from the 90s. I know the list is not indicative of the quality of the movie. But still happy to see this obscure Indian movie. Worth a watch. Highly rated on IMDB too.
I remember about 12-15 years ago, as a weekend project, I reached out to the creator of OpenSubtitles dot org and asked him for a dump of all the subtitles, which he promptly and happily provided. I then indexed them all in elasticsearch (it was a pretty nascent tech at the time), and created a movie quote finder, with timestamps. E.g. you could search for "i love you" and it would tell you all the movies and timestamps that phrase would be uttered. My lazy ass didn't go beyond a localhost version, but I still remember fondly of having gotten that working, it felt like magic at the time.
The movie It doesn’t have as many title drops as I would’ve expected. Also I don’t recall anyone ever saying The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in that film.
I think the GP's point (badly made) may be that the Lord of the rings example is addressed explicitly in the article.
"titles containing a colon are split and either side counts as a title drop. So for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring either "Lord of the Rings" or "Fellowship of the Ring" would count as title drops"
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
How would the commenter know to bring it up without reading the article? This feels like dodging the question of "why is the determination of a title drop so bad?"
Why should colons be such special case? Why not treat commata or dashes the same way? (And conversely, did they count the one in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie title?)
While the 1995 Japanese anime series, Neon Genesis Evangelion revolves around human-shaped weapons called "Evangelions", the "Neon Genesis" part of the title is neither part of the original Japanese name, nor its direct translation. The Japanese name is 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン / Shin-seiki evangerion, "Evangelion of a new era/century". The series has other non-direct translations too, and apparently this style was approved of the original creators, but it was always a bit of a mystery whether the gap in the interpretation was intentional or not.
However, over two decades later, with the re-boot movie series Rebuild of Evangelion, in the final scenes of the final movie, the protagonist name-drops the words "neon genesis" in appropriate context. I've never grinned as hard in movie theater.
Neon is relating to "new" via neo- prefix, with -n added on because the Western idea in the 90s of Japanese aesthetic was futuristic neon.
Genesis is for as beginning to the new era. It's etymology is Greek for "origin, creation, generation" which is a sort of an "era". Plus a looser translation provides the extra wordplay and thematic heft with the Angels due to Genesis being first book of the Bible.
Not a translator but I write a lot of poetry, and that's what would be going through my mind as I see the difference between the literal translation and the English decision and the additional capabilities this translation gives. In my mind, the initial translator 100% intended this "gap", which is less a gap and more of an additional layering.
They're both ancient Greek, but different grammatical genders: neon (νέον) is neuter, while γένεσις is feminine. Better might have been "nea genesis" if those two words were to be interpreted together. But, "evangelion" (εὐαγγέλιον) is also Greek and neuter, meaning the gospel, good news, or a reward owed a messenger for his good news. I always figured the "new" of "neon" belonged with the "evangelion," and "genesis" was just kind of hanging around for no particular reason.
> They're both ancient Greek
They are both modern english words even if they have roots in ancient greek.
> but different grammatical genders: neon (νέον) is neuter, while γένεσις is feminine.
νέον and γένεσις are gendered but neon and genesis are not.
BTW neon the gas was called so because it was a new discovery (in a well-searched area, the composition of air). The name basically means "a new something", neuter gender, could be "lo nuevo" in Spanish or "das neue" in German.
Since "evangelion" and "genesis" clearly are taken from Greek, so was apparently "neon".
What does the dialogue say in Japanese? Neon genesis or new era?
Intentionality matters. "It" should not count as a title drop. Nor Barbie (or any movie where the title is the characters name). But I understand it would be way more difficult to run the numbers with such a constraint. But this is a case where, to me, the results are very much tainted and thus I had to stop reading. To me this is like when developers run into a hard issue and somehow play a game of semantics with the wording of a ticket to avoid putting together something useful for the user
If you read a bit further he excludes instances like that and listed films with only a single (likely intentional) title drop.
As noted by other commenters, the author addresses this, although I would have loved to have had a version of all the _statistics_ with name-based drops elided.
I think a case could be made for “It” being a quasi-name and therefore a different word that is spelled the same or, because “it” is a pronoun it only counts when it is used to refer to the thing that the title itself refers to.
While it is somewhat arbitrary, I am sure that "Barbie" is intentional, the somewhat obnoxious repetition of the word "Barbie" fits the theme. Also, maybe you stopped reading a little too early as the case where the title is a character name is specially addressed.
"It" may be the the special case here, as it is a very common word by itself but that a movie is named like this is notable enough for it to be included.
I was more surprised by the fact that "Barbie" was said more times than "it", even though all of the "wrong" instances of "it" were counted as well.
It's possible there are just more lines of dialogue in Barbie than It, given the conventions around each genre. I haven't seen It, but I can assume with It being a horror film there are longer periods with no dialogue for suspense etc.
Barbie also has multiple characters named Barbie; There are times where Barbie is said three or four times in a single paragraph and even a sequence that's just a complete graph of Barbies saying "Hi Barbie" to each other.
Including films where the title is a character name makes the data set less interesting. “Barbie title-drops a ton!” yeah ok.
Have you stopped scrolling once you realized that? The article acknowledges that, and even has a special category of movies named after characters with just a single title drop.
That said, Barbie is a funny case indeed, as it's named after about half of its characters :P
The problem is that there aren't any lists for title drops excluding boring cases like that. So all the lists get dominated by those cases.
Might acknowledge, but fails to fix. For instance, leading genre is biography since they aren't excluding 'name dropping'.
Yes, but it would've been much more interesting to read about title drops where this is not the case. The top titledrops listed that are not names of a character are all names of something else, like locations or objects.
I agree, I think this analysis can benefit from some data sanitisation.
It is a silly one to include, because the word it is picked up by their analysis. Need to remove all hits except where the characters are referencing Pennywise directly.
I also noticed that in some cases a namedrop was registered where the eponymous character speaks, e.g. ALIENS: hisses. These need to be removed as well.
Movies where the name of the movie is the name of the leading character needs to be removed as well, or at least filterable from the list.
All of this makes the site a little less interesting imo. A good title drop in a movie is a fun little easter egg, especially if the name a bit more conceptual, e.g. The Phantom Menace. The way this site is set up at the moment makes it a bit more difficult to find those really good title drops.
This seems like something that could be handled easily with a second-pass on the data using an LLM. And the author has made the dataset available... [0]
[0] https://www.titledrops.net/
Including “It” on the list made it seem like a parody.
Exactly. If they had limited it to cases where "it" is referring to Pennywise, that would be one thing, but not when anyone uses a very common pronoun!
I think it's quite interesting to include. Apparently Barbie says "Barbie" more than It says "it", which is fascinating!
I’ve never seen It, but having seen Barbie, it’s not all that surprising lol.
whole conversation makes me just think: But how can we not say it, if we don't know what it is!
Ni!
I guess this is the downside of making a data analysis thing as a side project to hopefully get something going, but not having the time to take care of all potential edge cases.
I guess "Them!" is also affected by this, and maybe The Thing or The Birds...
This is IMO one of the coolest use cases of AI. With a half-decent prompt, an LLM is pretty good at tasks like those.
after doing a naive approach he then drills down into more proper title drops.
Both you and GP seem to have stopped reading the article early...
He specifically calls out `"real"` title drops just a few sections later.
To be fair, the article starts out seeming real for about the first third. It's only after the first list — Barbie, Damini, Sita,... Azhar, It — that it descends into obvious parody. Quote:
"What's interesting about the (Fiction) list here is that it's pretty international: only two of the top ten movies come from Hollywood, 6 are from India, one from Indonesia and one from Turkey. So it's definitely an international phenomenon."
Here the writer slides seamlessly from talking about movies with title drops to talking about movies with single-word titles which are also the name of the main character, but is still saying things like "What's interesting about this list..." and "...an international phenomenon," as if those are remotely the defining characteristics of the list he just gave. (The defining characteristic, again, is "movies named after the protagonist." That's all.)
Then there's a section break. Since the article clearly outed itself as parody right before the break, I think it's totally reasonable for anyone to stop reading it at that point. (Although maybe not 100% reasonable to come back and comment on HN about it, except maybe to express disappointment and save other people the bother of reading that far themselves.)
Anyway, after the break the author says, "You might have noticed [an icon on each movie that is] named after one of its characters." But scroll back up and you'll see that icon is missing from 4 of the movies in that list of 10: "Saina", "Nussa", "Arif v. 216", and "It". Of those 4, 3 are clearly named after a main character. The fourth (like "Ecks vs. Sever") is named after two characters (Arif and 216) but the graph shows that the author is counting instances of the name "Arif" alone, not instances of the phrase "Arif v 216".
So not only is the article trying to be funny, it's not even playing by consistent rules — it's a parody of an academic paper but also just flat-out lying about the data! That's not only annoying but uncool.
I would actually be interested in reading a real article on the phenomenon of title drops in movies, e.g. by someone who'd gone through a bunch of movies and tallied which of them contain title drops. But the linked article is just garbage.
I'm imagining some film school student explaining how Barbie would have been a better movie, a real film even, without mentioning the character's name.
In The Ghost Writer the main character's name is never mentioned.
Fight Club, either.
It's implied that his name is "Jack," assuming the poetry written from the point of view of Jack's organs were an earlier coping mechanism for the MC.
And Layer Cake
Now watch Rebecca.
Barbie could be en even better movie if one did a shot each time the name was heard.
That would make it a Fatal Attraction.
They could have just named the character and avoided this too
Indeed, and this contaminates all other analyses as well. Sure, shorter titles are dropped more frequently – but that sounds like it could be just because character names tend to make for short titles.
What a pessimistic view.
How sure are we that these so-called title drops are what this article purports them to be rather than the name of the film coming from the content and/or dialogue that is contained within it?
An analogy: when someone writes a song and then they need to name it, they will frequently choose a word or phrase that appears in the lyrics. When Leonard Cohen sings “hallelujah” in the song of the same name, is that a “title drop”? I assume not.
> How sure are we that these so-called title drops are what this article purports them to be
What does the article purport them to be? Right at the top I see:
> A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in.
That makes no distinction if the title or the script came first. The article does call out movies who do that in a cringe or obvious way (like Suicide Squad, which had prior art) but also includes movies where that is unavoidable, such as Barbie.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter which came first. As soon as you make a line and a title the same, the line becomes a title drop. The audience sees the final product, not the process.
> An analogy
That analogy doesn’t work. Songs are typically repetitive and a few minutes long. Everyone expects them to name the title. A movie, on the other hand, is an experience that asks suspension of disbelief from you, it tries to engross you in its world over the course of multiple hours. When a character title drops, in a second you’re suddenly and forcefully pulled back from the illusion and reminded you’re watching a movie.
> What does the article purport them to be? Right at the top I see:
It seems to imply a concerted effort to mention the title of the movie in the script in a meta, fourth wall breaking sort of way.
In some cases that's obviously true - Hot Tub Time Machine, Suicide Squad from their examples - but other times an untitled script just needs a title and it's plucked from the script.
I think there's a distinction there, because the latter is less of an Easter Egg sort of thing and more "ok now we need a title."
> It seems to imply a concerted effort to mention the title of the movie in the script in a meta, fourth wall breaking sort of way.
It makes zero difference to the movie watching experience if the script line came from the script or the other way around. While you’re watching the movie, the effect is exactly the same. So even if you took a line of dialog to make your title, it becomes a title drop nonetheless because the audience doesn’t know (nor should they care) which came first.
> It makes zero difference to the movie watching experience if the script line came from the script or the other way around. While you’re watching the movie, the effect is exactly the same.
Certainly not true in the case of a work adapted from another source like a novel. The words "The Fellowship of the Ring" are never uttered in The Fellowship of the Ring, and Peter Jackson's ham-fisted insert there was obvious even to people who hadn't read it, but especially to those of us who have.
And, by that token, if the dialogue suddenly seems awkward and stunted for no other reason than to insert the title, most people would probably conclude that the title came first.
And as I pointed out several hours ago, that complaint is about bad writing, which can happen in either direction.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42062800
> It makes zero difference to the movie watching experience if the script line came from the script or the other way around.
I disagree; if it's a quote that serves the narrative and isn't jammed in as a reference it doesn't have the same effect as the meta examples. Less of a fourth wall break.
That’s just called good writing. You could decide on a title first then skilfully add it as a quote that servers the narrative. Again, as an audience member you don’t know¹, except when it’s glaringly bad. It’s the toupée fallacy.
¹ I hope it’s obvious I’m excluding cases where someone deliberately seeks behind-the-scenes information. We’re talking about having only the result of the work as context.
It’s like anything in film. The viewer can speculate how it was constructed based on evidence in the work itself. The writing divide is certainly not the only source of evidence.
More generally we are not limited only to the film when trying to categorize based on this distinction. The distinction exists even if it is not always discernible.
That said, I think trying to construct separate lists based on this distinction would be nearly impossible.
I don’t think anyone would regard using Barbie’s name in the movie as a title drop.
The article does:
> Unsurprisingly, movies named after one of their characters have an average of 24.7 title drops, more than twice as much as the usual 10.3.
And this thread started exactly with the point of what the article considers title drops.
The article also highlights the interesting case of “movies named after a character with single title drops”. I’m willing to bet that in those movies, if the name is proffered late enough in the runtime, it may feel like a title drop because the the audience suddenly becomes aware the name had never been said before. When the name is said all the time or once but too early (so you’ll be primed to expect it more often) then the effect is bound to be lessened.
The movie "It" neither uses title drops, nor was the title plucked from the script.
> it doesn’t matter which came first
imo it does matter and is the difference between cringe (sometimes intentional) and not
It’s not the order of the writing that determines that, but the quality. Yes, the order can influence it, but it’s not the determining factor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42062800
My favorite "title drop" in a song is in How Soon is Now by the Smiths. After an instrumental break, Morrissey sings, "You say it's gonna happen now? What exactly do you mean..." You can almost hear the next line should be "How soon is now" but there's a pause and then he sings, "See I've already waited too long..." The title captures the mood of the song but is never actually said. It feels intentionally left out.
On the movie front, No Country for Old Men does something similar.
> So for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring either "Lord of the Rings" or "Fellowship of the Ring" would count as title drops (feel free to hover over the visualizations to explore the matches)!
An unacknowledged partial title drop for that movie is that "Lord of the Ring" (with no s at the end) is uttered.
That isn't the same thing. The Lord of the Rings is the One Ring. The Lord of the Ring is Sauron.
Sauron is twice called the Lord of the Rings in book two.
In chapter one, Many Meetings, Gandalf tells Frodo:
> Yes, I knew of them. Indeed I spoke of them once to you; for the Black Riders are the Ringwraiths, the Nine Servants of the Lord of the Rings.
And in chapter two, The Council of Elrond, Glorfindel says:
> And even if we could, soon or late the Lord of the Rings would learn of its hiding place and would bend all his power towards it.
In the final chapter (The Grey Havens) of book six, the Red Book is also titled by Frodo “THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING”. Now there’s a title drop.
(Just in case it’s not obvious: I’m talking about the books here, not the movies. Never seen ’em.)
I don't have my Fellowship at hand now, but doesn't Frodo joke near the beginning he's "the lord of the rings" and Gandalf scolds him by telling him something like "there's only one lord of the rings"?
Found the quote by googling, he was scolding Pippin, not Frodo, and it was "Ring" singular after all:
> "Hurray!" cried Pippin, springing up. "Here is our noble cousin! Make way for Frodo, Lord of the Ring!"
> "Hush!" said Gandalf from the shadows at the back of the porch. "Evil things do not come into this valley; but all the same we should not name them. The Lord of the Ring is not Frodo, but the master of the Dark Tower of Mordor, whose power is again stretching out over the world!"
(Book II, Chapter I)
Sauron is referred to as the Lord of the Ring and the Lord of the Rings (second being much more common) multiple times.
The Ring is referred to as The Ring, The One Ring, The Ruling Ring, and a few other things, but I do not think it is ever referred to as the "Lord" of anything.
> The Lord of the Rings is the One Ring
Source? I can't find anything.
”One Ring to rule them all
And in the darkness bind them.”
and Sauron used/uses that ring as a tool
The "Lord of the Rings" (plural) is explicitly acknowledged by Gandalf to be Sauron in the book.
Also in Peter Jackson's movie.
uh, no. I'm pretty sure Sauron is the Lord of the Rings including the one ring. Since he, you know, kind of made them all.
While you're right about Sauron being the Lord of the Rings, he didn't make all of them.
The three Elven rings were made in secret by Elves, and were untainted by Sauron. Disregard the TV show, which shows a version contradicting Tolkien.
This is the reason at the end of the Return of the King, with Sauron defeated, Gandalf, Galadriel and (Cirdan?) are able to openly wear the three again. Had they been tools of the Enemy, they would never have been worn again.
In The Rings of Power Sauron is called Lord of the Rings (plural)
I'm not sure why you think fanfiction is relevant to this discussion.
sometimes the title is in the script, but isn't actually a line said by anyone:
Aliens (1986)
(Aliens hissing)
https://www.titledrops.net/explorer?movies=tt0090605&title=
They even included one in the article. At least I sincerely doubt that "The Scarlet Bond That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime" [sic] was dialogue. Given the context I'm fairly sure it's just the title showing up on screen, but subtitled because it's in Japanese.
How about movies where the title drop is the very last line? I can only think of one (it's not really a spoiler, but SPOILERS I guess).
The last line of My Dinner with Andre is "my dinner with Andre." I think that only works because the whole movie feels like a stage play, and there's something very stagey about that choice.
The one that sprang to mind for me was The Name of the Rose. Oddly it doesn’t show up as a title drop in the data.
> Similarly, movies named after a protagonist have a title drop rate of 88.5% while only 34.2% of other movies drop their titles.
What is much more interesting is that 11.5% of movies named after their protagonist never mention them by name. I guess I can imagine a few edge cases where this would be usual (protagonists not usually called by their name due to their position, like kings, and movies with little talking), but it's surprising that there are that many.
I was utterly disturbed by a story sent into the Kermode and Mayo radio show many years ago. The listener explained that their family went to the theatre, sat down in their seats to watch the film, and then upon the first utterance of the title of the film they would clap, stand up, and walk out.
I assume this to be a joke. I've never found any reference of anybody doing this online, or anybody even discussing this one story from the show. But holy shit does it make my skin crawl.
Tangibly related, mandatory family guy reference: https://youtu.be/lospTnfovr8
Maybe I was (un)lucky, but the only film I've checked was "Inception". It's spoken at 19:24, but the explorer states the title is not dropped at all. I had to actually look it up, as I've doubted my memory for a second.
Wild, that was the first title I tried as well. It is such a specific word, hence why I tried it first.
It's actually said eight times in the movie (I ctrl+f'd an .srt file). The page mentions the methodology was to use opensubtitles.com, but not how which specific version was to be used from that website was chosen (because opensusbtitles.com lists tons of possible files for each language depending on what version of torrent/etc they match). It is possible that the download script used accidentally chose non-English .srt files sometimes for some films.
Was 'je ne regrette rien' playing when you had that doubt?
Just dropping in to say thank you! Fun read, fun idea, well executed.
Smells like the old internet!
Runpee.com for when best to pee during a long film, Mr Skin for nude scenes (Flesh of The Stars in Knocked up fiction) … and titledrops.net for title drops.
Your list made me remember doesthedogdie.com which lists diverse trigger warnings in movies and other media.
Ah yes ! Should have included.
https://youtu.be/OiqPmsBYieA?feature=shared i had the titular line in star wars...
Yay, someone posted it before I had to. This skit is 25 years old now!
First thing I thought of. “Man, I’m just so tired of these Star Wars.”
What a fun read! I should point out though that the movie Saina definitely needs a "name" icon next to it, as it's a biopic of badminton player Saina Nehwal.
I favor those dramatic Gaspar Noe title drops, the title in huge red letters full screen, over characters naming the title. It's huge.
But then opensubtitles couldn't be used to analyse that.
Referenced strongly in 2024’s The Substance.
Yes, exactly! Good catch
There's a parody account on Twitter that I dearly love for these. In particular: https://x.com/Saythetitle/status/909933269982105605
(It's a shame there's no nice way on Twitter to sort by number of favorites. You can approximate it by searching for "from:<accountname> min_faves:<number>", but it doesn't correct for the number of followers the person had at a given point. Which is a problem with subreddit "top" sorting, come to think of it, as it strongly weights recent posts when the subreddit was more popular. Always wished they'd fix that.)
The hardest name drop of the last decade has got to be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln6ZxXSnMwg (Massive spoilers for Last Fiction 16).
Yes, it's a game, but from one of two series that cemented video games as a cinematic medium, when developers so desire. 35 years of build-up, and a love letter to the whole series, including (especially) the ones people derided (FNC). Also, interesting because it's not a direct quote of the title, but still something that everyone who got to this point recognized immediately.
Hmmm... I nominate Mortal Kombat (1995) for the cringiest title drops. Instead of being used once for a climatic fight scene, they keep dropping it over and over (10 times according to the article).
one of my favorites is Robocop 2 (1990):
> 00:23:19 it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you, Robocop 2
Deathstalker 2 is probably my favorite instance of a sequel number being incorporated into the title drop. Not only is it one of the first lines of the movie, the timing is impeccable.
https://youtu.be/BkPxZLWeTBg
Robocop 2 is a critique of sequels - everything must be bigger and better, designed by committee, with every idea (directive) shoved into the box until it becomes unworkable.
A pointed reversal of this is "We Need to Talk About Kevin", which went unsaid through the movie.
Which is why it's such a great title. All that irony
Does this not take in to account lyrics in musical movies? I looked up Across the Universe and it reported zero name drops despite there being at least a dozen.
“That’s the name of the movie!” - most Pitch Meeting videos
For reference: https://www.youtube.com/@PitchMeetings
and "Roll Credits" in CinemaSins
One thing they deem to be a movie “sin” is the fact that movies will often have a line of dialogue in which they'll say the title of the movie. Whenever a movie does this, the CinemaSins Narrator will exclaim “Roll Credits,” as though the title of the film can only be mentioned in the absolute last line of dialogue.
https://popculturalstudies.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/in-defen... highlights some examples.
Now I wonder how many title drops are the last line or near enough as such ...
The Elephant (2003) has my favorite Title drop, and of course, is not marked in this database. As I remember it, at some point in the movie we are shown a drawing of an elephant randomly hanging in the room of one of the protagonists. Both the drawing, and the main protagonists are easy to ignore, yet are the main subjects of the movie.
Fake title drops is one of my favorite memes, which is a screenshot from a movie/series with fake subtitles. Example:
https://preview.redd.it/in-the-netflix-original-series-resid...
edit: oops, just noticed the article also mentions the meme
"What, we some kinda... Suicide Squad?" (◔_◔)
Some movies have a working title and the release is different. We may never know how many title drops are in those. Although we know that the working title for "The Dark Knight" was "Rory's First Kiss".
The working title of the project is often public, e.g. on signs to the location shoot, and as such is often cryptic so that that the casual observer won't know that e.g. "Rory's First Kiss" is a Batman movie.
There was an Instagram account or YouTube channel that used to make funny videos of the films ending with the credits rolling at the exact point the title of the film was said—anyone have any recollection of that?
Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DMndH8QiI4
The closing music choices are excellent.
A bug: In "Highest title drops by decade", 1960, "Best rated (at least 1 drop)", it lists Psycho with 0 drops. It really does seem to be 0, so shouldn't show up here.
A different bug in the article: It lists That Time I Got Reincarnated… (awfully long title) as having one, but I'm pretty sure that's just a translation of the title card:
Reminded me of a scene in Barry¹ where the title character gets a small part in a movie and while his washed-up teacher is reviewing the script he sees Barry’s single line of dialogue and exclaims “That’s the name of the movie! They can’t cut that!”
¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_(TV_series)
Patrick, you're the American psycho!
I really like a credit drop a la Gaspar Noe just rolling the credits mid way through Climax.
I like the idea of a surrealist scene in a restaurant where the credits are just tucked away in a menu. Maybe it's been done
"The only way for me to solve this crisis is to be Superman 4 - The Quest for Peace"
It's actually well executed how they managed to say exactly once "Amadeus" or "Patton" in their biographical films.
For as cheesy as the Fast and Furious movies are they still haven't really done this with the exception of Tokyo Drift I think.
One of my favorite title drops is in Arrested Development:
Michael Bluth: "Your average American male is in a perpetual state of adolescence, you know, arrested development"
Narrator: "Hey! Thats the name of the show"
The narrator, Ron Howard, also appears in an episode while still doing the narration and referring to himself.
The show is more meta than Deadpool.
> Chachi: "Look, this is not the first time I’ve been brought in to replace Barry Zuckerman. I think I can do for you everything he did, plus skew younger…"
> Narrator: "No one was making fun of Andy Griffith. I can't emphasize that enough."
Wow I love the presentation of this website, very nice!
Love data x film. https://stephenfollows.substack.com/ does a lot of this kind of work.
Most ridiculous one has to be "I have my 50 shades of grey" or something like that dropped in the same movie.
I only know this because of the fun honest reviews made of it.
"I'm 50 shades of fucked up" if I recall correctly, which was as much forced as it was cringe. I never watched the film or read the books thankfully.
You're right, I rewatched the video!
It's even worse than I remembered.
No, you're both wrong, nothing was "forced".
That dialogue is from the book. The book gets its title from the dialogue. The film has the same title and dialogue because it's based on the book.
There is no point where script writers are sat down trying to figure out how to work the title into the dialogue.
Oh my god this seems like so much work. I'm exhausted on their behalf.
The one in Hot Tub Time Machine will never stop being funny to me.
I would've liked 2d charts or at least stacked bar charts for the correlation ones to see if the correlations are different for ones with only one drop or many drops
Indian Movies had this trend since early days till lates 90s Every movie has 1 dialogue 1 song That says title of movie
Family Guy on the topic: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8mYLi3PGOc>
Isn't "Dune" said once in both of the Villeneuve movies?
I remember it in the second one at least:
https://youtu.be/r99hB4FzhXw?&t=153
“A View to a Kill (1985)” The database does not recognise when the movie name is spoken by 2 people. In this movie 1 character begins the sentence “what a view…” and a 2nd character completes the line: “…to a kill”.
Happy to see Damini movie in that list. It's an excellent Bollywood movie from the 90s. I know the list is not indicative of the quality of the movie. But still happy to see this obscure Indian movie. Worth a watch. Highly rated on IMDB too.
Brokeback Mountain apparently has 0 title drops, even though all Ennis and Jack have is Brokeback Mountain!
Unfortunately he'll miss e.g. "I'm sick and tired of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane."
"I'm just so tired of all these star wars"
Sometimes the title is added after the script
I just came here to say I love the bulgy animation as you scrub through the movie to see the drops.
This is a fun idea but I also appreciate the extra effort to make it nice to explore!
I remember about 12-15 years ago, as a weekend project, I reached out to the creator of OpenSubtitles dot org and asked him for a dump of all the subtitles, which he promptly and happily provided. I then indexed them all in elasticsearch (it was a pretty nascent tech at the time), and created a movie quote finder, with timestamps. E.g. you could search for "i love you" and it would tell you all the movies and timestamps that phrase would be uttered. My lazy ass didn't go beyond a localhost version, but I still remember fondly of having gotten that working, it felt like magic at the time.
what is title drops ? what doest it mean ?
The first line¹ of the article explains it. It even has “title drop” in bold.
¹ Literally
The article explains it very well.
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well educative for people from creative fields
The movie It doesn’t have as many title drops as I would’ve expected. Also I don’t recall anyone ever saying The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in that film.
You should, perhaps, read the article.
I obviously read at least some of the article.
I think the GP's point (badly made) may be that the Lord of the rings example is addressed explicitly in the article.
"titles containing a colon are split and either side counts as a title drop. So for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring either "Lord of the Rings" or "Fellowship of the Ring" would count as title drops"
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
How would the commenter know to bring it up without reading the article? This feels like dodging the question of "why is the determination of a title drop so bad?"
There's a section in the article regarding how to handle colons.
Why should colons be such special case? Why not treat commata or dashes the same way? (And conversely, did they count the one in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie title?)
Yet again, this feels like dodging the question of "why is the determination of a title drop so bad?"
C'mon it was half the content of my comment and you still refused to acknowledge it. What do you want
Elrond Peredhel, Lord of Rivendell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8cU48PD0LI&t=7s