Hey, Let’s Play the Movie Title Game!

Earlier this year, research audiences were shown a new thriller in which a brainy billionaire and a stylish fashion photographer are stranded in the Alaskan wilderness. They are forced to rely on each other for survival despite the rich man’s suspicion that the photographer is plotting to kill him--not for his money, but for his beautiful wife.

According to producer Art Linson, the recruited moviegoers gasped and thrilled in all the right places. The bad news came when they filled out their preview cards. “Everyone said, ‘Loved the movie--hope you’re really not going to call it ‘The Bookworm.’ ”

The film’s distributor, 20th Century Fox, has picked a new title--”The Edge,” which it hopes will help tantalize moviegoers when the film is released next month. But the decision came only after months of sophisticated market research. In an era where moviegoers are faced with an armada of new films every weekend, the search for the perfect title--call it Hollywood’s version of the Name Game--has become one of the most important, if little understood, ingredients in a major-studio marketing campaign.

For a marketing-conscious studio chief like Disney’s Joe Roth, a movie title is worth big money. When Disney first developed “Ransom,” the Mel Gibson-starring thriller about a father rescuing his son from diabolical kidnappers, the title was owned by Sony Pictures.

To obtain rights to the title, Roth paid Columbia $600,000. (The film grossed $136 million domestically.) “I would do it again in a second,” he says. “It was absolutely perfect. Imagine having a one-word title for a Mel Gibson movie that tells you the whole story of the film.

“There’s no way to exaggerate how important a movie title can be. We’re surrounded by so much cultural clutter that you’re halfway home if you can find a title that helps you distinguish your product or connect it with a specific image or sell phrase.”

Friday, Disney will release a Demi Moore action-adventure yarn called “G.I. Jane.” Until earlier this year, it was going by the somewhat obscure monikers “In Pursuit of Honor” and “Navy Cross,” largely because the Hasbro toy firm owned the rights to G.I. Jane. Disney eventually paid several hundred thousand dollars for the title, plus assurances to Hasbro that the film wouldn’t damage or denigrate the toy firm’s G.I. Jane franchise.

“Love it or hate it, that title sticks to the wall,” Roth says. “It’s the one title we could find that told you what the movie was about.”

Paramount recently renamed its upcoming Christian Slater-starring film, “The Flood,” giving it the new title “Hard Rain.” Concerned that the film was arriving at the tail end of a string of poorly received disaster pictures, the studio pulled the film from summer release and has been constructing a new marketing campaign, starting with a new title.

“We have a thriller with a great heist and compelling characters,” explains producer Mark Gordon. “But to our audience, the title said ‘Volcano’ or ‘Twister.’ People thought it was a disaster movie at a time when people don’t seem eager to see more disaster movies.”

Studio marketing experts say a bad title can irreparably harm a film’s image with moviegoers. “A movie starts to breathe with a title--it’s the first thing about a film that audiences are exposed to,” says Tom Sherak, chairman of the 20th Century Fox domestic film group. “And when you’re going up against dozens of other films, it’s important to make a good first impression.”

Sherak says that, in hindsight, he wishes he’d found a different title for the studio’s 1991 drama “Dying Young.” The film starred Julia Roberts in a story about a dying man who falls in love with his nurse. “It was a tough sell under any circumstances, but that title made it seem even more downbeat than it was. It was so bad that when we made up promotional T-shirts for the film, no one wanted to wear them.”

Sherak notes that when Disney had a film with a similar story line, the studio shrewdly changed the title from “Coma Guy” to “While You Were Sleeping.” “There are a lot of reasons why it was a hit,” he says. “But the title played a big part. Who would’ve gone to see a love story called ‘Coma Guy’?”

The hardest thing about picking a title is that the best choices are often already taken. When studios buy scripts or books, they register the property with the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s title registration bureau. Each MPAA-member studio is allowed 250 titles under permanent registration--the larger studios, using corporate-umbrella entities, retain thousands of registered titles. The MPAA issues a daily title-registration report tracking newly registered titles, giving studios 10 working days to file a protest against a title too similar to one of their own.

The MPAA receives hundreds of protests each year, but few go to formal arbitration--last year, it made only six title arbitration rulings. Final decisions are in the hands of a three-person arbitration panel, made up of representatives from studios not involved in the dispute. Most squabbles are resolved privately. If a studio wants a title owned by one of its rivals, it can offer to buy it, as Disney did with “Ransom,” or it can offer a trade for one of its own film titles.

One of Disney’s big 1998 films is a Pixar-produced computer-animation comedy called “A Bug’s Life.” Since the movie is aimed at family audiences, Warner Bros. Pictures lodged a protest, protecting its most valuable animated character, Bugs Bunny. The result, as Roth recalls it, was a trade. Disney gave up the rights to two titles it had--”Fathers’ Day” and “Conspiracy Theory”--for permission to use the Bug name.

If the two parties can’t make a deal, the film gets a new title. Oliver Stone’s coming film “Stray Dogs” is now titled “U-Turn,” because the original title is the property of Akira Kurosawa, whose company wouldn’t clear the name. “Hurricane Streets,” an MGM urban drama due this fall, was changed from “Hurricane,” because that title is owned by Paramount, which made a 1979 film by the same name.

One film that went to arbitration was “French Kiss,” the 1995 Meg Ryan comedy that was originally titled “Paris Match.” Castle Rock Entertainment challenged the title, saying it was too similar to “Forget Paris,” the Billy Crystal comedy it was releasing within months of the rival film. The MPAA arbiters ruled in Castle Rock’s favor, noting that both films were romantic comedies, partially set in Paris, with the added confusion of having two stars who had previously starred in the romantic comedy, “When Harry Met Sally. . . . “

Despite this strict vigilance, loopholes exist in the system. In recent years, Sony has made both “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and “Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.” It’s not that the studio wanted to honor the long-dead authors of the horror classics. But by using their names in the title, Sony cleverly differentiated the films from the original horror movies, which are registered to Universal Pictures. Universal took Sony to arbitration, but the MPAA ruled in Sony’s favor.

One of the rare disputes to make news occurred earlier this year when Miramax released “Scream,” a horror film originally titled “Scary Movie.”

When Miramax first registered the new title, Sony complained that the name was too similar to “Screamers,” a film it had released through its Triumph Pictures subsidiary. By the time the MPAA ordered an arbitration meeting, the film had been in the theaters for six weeks. Sources say Miramax then stalled for an additional month before agreeing to an April arbitration panel session. The delay caused consternation among panel members, who felt Miramax had thumbed its nose at the arbitration process.

To get Miramax’s attention, the panel leveled an unprecedented series of fines: a stiff $1,500-a-day, per-screen fine (at a time when the film was in 1,200 theaters), plus $20,000 for unauthorized use of the title and another $20,000 in legal fees. With a sequel already in the works that would face a dramatic loss of box-office potential if it were promoted under a different title, Miramax quietly settled the dispute. Sources say Sony dropped its protest in return for more favorable terms from Disney, Miramax’s parent company, on “Starship Troopers,” a sci-fi thriller the two studios are co-producing, due in November.

Titles often get changed, even when no disputes are involved. This fall, TriStar Pictures is releasing “Swept From the Sea,” a period British romance that had previously been called “Amy Foster” and “To Love and Be Loved.” “We thought the original title made it feel too much like a small English film,” says producer Mike Medavoy. “But the second title felt too much like a woman’s film. This was the title that best captured the spirit of the story.”

Sometimes a perfectly good title can lose its appeal, especially when a similar-sounding film has arrived first--and bombed. Last summer, Fox released a Keanu Reeves action film called “Chain Reaction.” The movie’s original title had been “Dead Drop.” But Paramount had recently released an unsuccessful action film called “Drop Zone,” and Fox didn’t want to burden the new film with any negative associations. Even with a new title, the film still failed.

Disney has the opposite problem with its coming remake of “The Absent-Minded Professor,” which stars Robin Williams in the old Fred McMurray role. “It would’ve been a great title two years ago,” Roth says. “But after the huge success of ‘The Nutty Professor,’ we were worried that it would feel like an Eddie Murphy knockoff.” The studio’s new title, “Flubber,” may appeal to baby-boomer parents, but doesn’t have much nostalgia value for today’s kids.

Most film sequels use the same brand-name with each new release. One exception: the James Bond series. The latest installment, due in December from MGM, is called “Tomorrow Never Dies.” MGM tested a variation, “Tomorrow Never Comes,” but it lost out to “Dies,” which promises more mayhem and action.

“Bond titles are really important, because you want something that implies a lot of action and excitement,” explains Gerry Rich, MGM’s head of worldwide marketing. “The film always has an opening title sequence that showcases the title song. So the title carries a lot of weight, because you’ll be hearing it as well as seeing it.”

Fox has been taking no chances with “The Edge.” Once it was clear that audiences were nonplused by “The Bookworm,” market-research teams began buttonholing potential filmgoers outside heavily trafficked movie theaters--a tactic known as a “mall intercept.” Moviegoers were shown three mock-ups of a film poster, all with the same imagery, starring actors and ad copy, but with different titles.

“The Wild” tested as well as “The Edge,” but Fox couldn’t clear “The Wild”--Francis Ford Coppola owns the rights to a short story with that title--so it went with “The Edge.” “We also tested the title ‘The Uncivilized,’ ” Sherak says. “But it didn’t read well on the ad copy. There’s something about seeing Z’s on the printed page that just doesn’t look right.”

If there were ever a title that looked right, it would be “Star Wars,” the name of the most celebrated franchise in film history. But it almost didn’t work out that way.

“Fox tried to talk us out of using that title,” recalls producer Sid Ganis, then head of marketing at Lucasfilm. “Their research said that ‘Star’ shouldn’t be in the title, because science-fiction movies were out of fashion, and ‘Wars’ wasn’t any good because war movies weren’t so popular either. But George Lucas wouldn’t budge. He said that’s the name of the film and that’s that. You’d have to say it turned out to be a pretty good title, didn’t it?”

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Some Names in the Studio Game

What’s in a name? Here’s what studios have thought, in some coming cases:

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OLD TITLE NEW TITLE STUDIO “The Bookworm” “The Edge” 20th Century Fox “Stray Dogs” “U-Turn” TriStar “Kilronan” “Bloodline” TriStar “Amy Foster” “Swept From the Sea” TriStar (and “To Love and Be Loved”) “Venice” “Courtesan” Warner Bros. “Space Cadet” “Rocket Man” Disney “Hurricane” “Hurricane Streets” MGM “In Pursuit of Honor” “G.I. Jane” Disney (and “Navy Cross”)

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And here are some films that already have been released, with their original titles:

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OLD TITLE NEW TITLE STUDIO “The Colony” “Double Team” Columbia “Trigger Happy” “Mad Dog Time” MGM “Welcome to Jericho” “Last Man Standing” New Line “Birds of a Feather” “The Birdcage” MGM “Dead Drop” “Chain Reaction” 20th Century Fox “Scary Movie” “Scream” Miramax “Amelia and the King of Plants” “Bed of Roses” New Line “My Posse Don’t Do Homework” “Dangerous Minds” Disney “Paris Match” “French Kiss” 20th Century Fox “Coma Guy” “While You Were Sleeping” Disney “Cop Gives Waitress “It Could Happen to You” TriStar $1 Million Tip” “Looters” “Trespass” Universal

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