5 Movies That Got Renamed Because Audiences Are Idiots

5 Pretty Woman

Pretty Woman started out so different that when you hear what the original script was like, you’ll find it impossible to ever again take the finished product seriously. It was supposed to be a gritty look at a sex worker’s life, and the final scene was going to be Julia Roberts’ character crying as she fishes money out of the gutter. Some people have called Anora an honest, real-world twist on Pretty Woman, but the original Pretty Woman was already that. 

Screenwriter J.F. Lawton originally called the movie 3,000, since that’s the sum Richard Gere’s character offers Vivian when he hires her for the weekend. Along with changing everything else about the movie, Walt Disney changed the name. 3,000 looks like a year, and if audiences thought this was a movie set in the year 3000, they’d think it was sci-fi and steer clear. 

Now that you know Pretty Woman is the dumbed-down version of the movie, you can stop and reflect on how the title, too, is quite dumb. “Pretty woman”? That’s caveman speak. Sure, it sounded fine to people since they knew the Roy Orbison song, but a title for a song can be ridiculous when applied to a story. “Fast Car” is a classic song, but if, instead of The Fast and the Furious, they called that movie Fast Car, that would be pretty dumb, even for a franchise that would go on to be famously dumb. 

4 Death Wish 3

Speaking of film franchises with unusual number systems, let’s talk about Death Wish. The original Death Wish came out in 1974. Six years later came the sequel, Death Wish II. Three years after that, we got Death Wish 3, which is roughly what you’d expect the next to be called, except you probably would have thought they’d have gone with Death Wish III. 

They were going to. But according to marketing surveys, the average moviegoer could not read Roman numerals. So, that title would needlessly cost them many potential audience members who’d think it was just the original movie again, with a bunch of i’s inexplicably tacked on at the end.

This theory, that no one in 1984 would come out for a title with a III at the end, is hard to swallow considering the significant success of 1982’s Rocky III. Even after Rocky IV was bigger still, Death Wish eschewed Roman numerals for Death Wish 4: The Crackdown. Not until Rocky V, the least profitable in the series to date, did Death Wish admit their mistake and return to Roman style for Death Wish V: The Face of Death. 

That’s especially ironic because though everyone does understand what that V means, a single V is arguably the Roman numeral most likely to be misinterpreted. “III,” meanwhile, more obviously means 3, whether you know Roman numerals or not. They’re tally marks. You don’t need to know any type of numerals to understand them. 

3 License to Kill

The first four James Bond movies all took their names from Ian Fleming novels. The fifth did not, and they were going to call it License Revoked, because Bond gets his license to kill revoked in this one. They ended up instead calling it License to Kill, which doesn’t seem nearly so meaningful a title because Bond has a license to kill in every single movie.

The way this story sometimes get told, the studio ended up deciding that “revoked” was too complex a word for American audiences. This would draw quite a contrast with the series two decades later, when Quantum of Solace was deemed a perfectly acceptable title.

In reality, American audiences were thoroughly familiar with the phrase “license revoked,” and that was the problem. According to market research, Americans associated those words with getting their driver’s license revoked. An entire movie about 007 losing his driver’s license following a DUI might be the sort of grounded tale that would really shake up the series, but few audiences would be interested in that, so the title had to go. 

2 October Sky

The 1999 film October Sky is based on a 1998 memoir titled Rocket Boys. It’s the true story of Homer Hickam, who grew up building his own rockets with a group of friends who called themselves the Rocket Boys. When Universal Pictures adapted the book into a movie, they figured the Rocket Boys title wouldn’t play well with women over 30, so keeping it would needlessly hold the movie back. 

This idea, we suppose, is that Rocket Boys sounds more like a cartoon about heroes flying through the air than a biopic set in 1950s West Virginia. But you’d hope they were planning on giving some hint about the movie’s premise through the poster or trailers and weren’t totally relying on the title to lure people in.

The title they ended up choosing was October Sky, which does mean something in context if you watch the movie but which otherwise offers you nothing but vibes.

They picked October Sky because it’s an anagram of Rocket Boys. That’s clever, but it’s the cleverness of a troll under a bridge devising word puzzles for no one’s benefit but himself. 

1 A.I. Artificial Intelligence

The title A.I. Artificial Intelligence hearkens back to that Spielberg classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The first draft of E.T. was titled E.T. and Me, without spelling out what the letters stand for. Actually, the earliest draft was called Night Skies, evidently because they wanted to court women over 30, but a later draft was titled E.T. and Me before they figured they should let people know what that acronym meant.

Similarly, the 2001 movie was just going to be called A.I. before the name changed to A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The final name is kind of redundant. There’s not even a colon in there but just the same thing said in two different ways. But the studio figured that “A.I.” was too obscure a term for people to understand on its own. People would look at it and pronounce it “A-one,” like A.1. Steak Sauce.

Clearly, we now live in a different time. You’d have to be truly cut off from the world to make that mistake today. You’d have to be a yak herder on some isolated mountain maybe. Or the Secretary of Education of the United States. 

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