--- title: 10 Movies With Very Long Titles description: A short history of some very long-titled movies (or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying About Marketing and Love Our Bomb) canonical: https://time.com/archive/7119868/word-power-10-memorable-movies-with-long-titles/ author: Gary Susman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2013-02-12T13:00:28.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-16T05:49:28.723Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: 10 Movies With Very Long Titles og:description: A short history of some very long-titled movies (or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying About Marketing and Love Our Bomb) og:url: https://time.com/archive/7119868/word-power-10-memorable-movies-with-long-titles/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf5efc00b8a2c6b29/698a8f249d83e871bfb9fbbc/to-wong-foo-thanks-for-everything-julie-newmar-original.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1500 og:image:height: 844 og:image:alt: Populist: To Wong Foo og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 10 Movies With Very Long Titles twitter:description: A short history of some very long-titled movies (or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying About Marketing and Love Our Bomb) twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf5efc00b8a2c6b29/698a8f249d83e871bfb9fbbc/to-wong-foo-thanks-for-everything-julie-newmar-original.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Word Power: 10 Memorable Movies With Long Titles > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Gary Susman](https://time.com/author/gary-susman/) Feb 12, 2013 1:00 PM UTC  Universal Pictures by [Gary Susman](https://time.com/author/gary-susman/) Feb 12, 2013 1:00 PM UTC A short history of some very long-titled movies (or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying About Marketing and Love Our Bomb) ## Glut's in a Name 
The road looks rough for the new film A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. Not because its star is the mercurial Charlie Sheen, but because the title is too long to fit on your average theater marquee. These days, short titles are in. Liam Neeson movies are hits, and it's probably not a coincidence that you can bark out the names of several recent ones ("Taken!" "Unknown!" "The Grey!" "Taken 2!") faster than the Irish bruiser can snap a thug's neck.



Conversely, it's likely that no small amount of fan frustration with Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and the other Star Wars prequels emanated from the fact that their triple-decker titles were long enough to need a colon and a dash. For marketing reasons alone, you'd think movie studios would go with short and sweet rather than long and hard to remember, but sometimes filmmakers apparently insist that you need the full eight or 10 or 15 words for maximum comic or dramatic impact.



So perhaps we should hail Roman Coppola for getting a movie released in 2013 that will tax the thumbs of texters and Tweeters. After all, he's in good company, as the following list of movies with marquee-straining titles suggests. niennunb ## Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx 
Sometimes, a long and unwieldy title is preferable to the alternative. When this movie was re-released as Fun Loving, audiences understandably avoided it. But who wouldn't be intrigued by the original title, however ungainly? The movie is a romantic comedy about an Irish dreamer (played by far-from-Irish Gene Wilder) who lives at home and makes a few pounds by picking up horse manure off the streets of Dublin and selling it as fertilizer. But modernity encroaches, in the form of an edict banning horse-drawn wagons from the city and a clock-punching job alongside his father at a factory after the manure business dries up. Fortunately for Fortune, there's an opportunity for escape in the form of a romance with a proto-Manic Pixie Dream Girl, an American college student with the equally unlikely name of Zazel (Margot Kidder). And there's also that title cousin, though it's not clear how Quackser expects to escape modernity by moving to New York City. Most of the movie's strange charm may lie in the title. It does have some fans who insist that Wilder and Kidder make a winning couple, as well as detractors who feel that the movie, like Quackser's pushcart, is full of, um, blarney. niennunb ## The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain 
This film captured Hugh Grant just after Four Weddings and a Funeral, which is to say, at the height of his stammering romantic-lead charm. Like so many Grant characters, his protagonist here would have had an awfully hard time spitting out this title. In one of those quirky, ensemble comedies from the British Isles that's full of colorful villagers making mischief (The Full Monty, Waking Ned Devine, Calendar Girls, et al), Grant plays an English surveyor making an official map of a Welsh village, whose residents are insulted to learn that their pride and joy, a local peak, rises a few feet too short to qualify as a mountain. They conspire all manner of tomfoolery to keep him from leaving town until they can pile enough dirt and rock on the hill for Grant to reclassify it. Part of the plan involves a local woman of dubious virtue (Tara FitzGerald, who also played Grant's wife in Sirens). How charming you'll find all of this depends on your tolerance for small-town eccentricity. (And tweed: They could have raised the mountain just by piling all the film's wool costumes on top.) The movie earned a respectable $11 million in the US, so all that wool and Welsh whimsy didn't go to waste. niennunb ## Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood 
Here's a parody of the early-'90s wave of earnest, gritty movies about young black men trying to steer clear of the pitfalls of guns, gangs, and drugs—a trend that began with Boyz N the Hood and continued with Menace II Society, South Central, and Juice, all of which are referenced in this title. The spoof was the brainchild of the Wayans family, of I'm Gonna Git You Sucka and In Living Color fame. Much of the film's humor may have been crammed into the title (“the only film this year with 14 words in the title,” boasted the trailer), but there were a few sharp, knowing jokes. (A then-unknown Bernie Mac plays a black cop named Officer Self Hatred.) The film earned a solid $30 million, but creators/stars Shawn and Marlon Wayans were smart enough to avoid the overstuffed title on their next major spoof, the 2000 horror movie parody, Scary Movie (that one grossed $157 million). Since then, the Wayans brothers have gone for short, generic titles for their parodies, including Marlon's 2013 hit A Haunted House. niennunb ## The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford 
Brad Pitt, who starred and produced, had it written into his contract that Warner Bros. would not shorten the title of this adaptation of Ron Hansen's 1983 novel. Indeed, without Pitt, the moody, contemplative Western, about the close relationship between the famous outlaw (Pitt) and the pardner (Casey Affleck) who ultimately shot him. Also, without Pitt, the movie wouldn't have had a little-known New Zealand-born director, Andrew Dominik (Chopper). It wouldn't have had a running time as long as its title (160 minutes). And it wouldn't have had so few action scenes and so much brooding. Instead of the Brad Pitt shoot-'em-up that the studio probably would have preferred, Pitt and Dominik made a $30 million art movie that grossed only half its budget. History may be kinder to the film than moviegoers were; many critics think it contains some of the finest work of Pitt's and Affleck's careers. In the no-hard-feelings department, Pitt and Dominik reunited for the 2012 noir Killing Them Softly. Despite a much shorter title, it flopped as well. niennunb ## To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar 
The title comes from the inscription on a picture—autographed by the Catwoman actress herself—that playwright Douglas Carter Beane saw hanging on the wall of a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan. In Beane's screenplay, three drag queens (Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo) liberate the photo and take it with them on their road trip. As in the similar (and similarly long-titled) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the three big-city drag performers find themselves stranded by automotive trouble in a small town that apparently has no cable TV subscribers to Bravo or Logo. Lessons about tolerance and not judging a book by its fabulous cover are duly dispensed before the trio leave town, on their way to a meeting with destiny and the real Julie Newmar. The movie earned a decent $50 million in 1995, but today, it's remembered mostly for that title, and for proving that it would take more than drag to derail the careers of macho leading men like Snipes and Swayze. niennunb ## Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 
Today, few people remember Peter George's novel Red Alert, but everyone knows the windy-titled movie Stanley Kubrick made from it. (George co-wrote the screenplay with Kubrick and Terry Southern.) It's a bizarre title if you think about it. Even though Peter Sellers plays three roles, there's no protagonist in this satirical ensemble picture, so who's the "I"? Certainly not Strangelove, whose eerie poise, lugubrious German accent, and brutally pragmatic realpolitik suggested Henry Kissinger before anyone had ever heard of him, He seems never to have endured a moment of worry or lack of love for the bomb. At any rate, the title didn't stop the nuclear satire from becoming a modern classic, perhaps because the character's name offered an easy, short version. That's a good lesson; think how hard it would have been for 2006 movie with the subtitle Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan to become a smash if we couldn't all shorten it to Borat. niennunb ## The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? 
Even upon its release, this wasn't the longest-titled horror movie; Roger Corman had it beat with his 1957 opus The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. Still, Ray Dennis Steckler's $38,000 masterpiece did boast the distinction of being "the first monster musical," beating The Horror of Party Beach by a month. Steckler, who also starred (under the stage name Cash Flagg), wanted to call the movie The Incredibly Strange Creatures, or Why I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-Up Zombie, but Columbia Pictures threatened to sue him over the alleged similarity to Dr Strangelove’s full title, which was filming at the same time. It's not clear that Steckler's compromise title worked any better on drive-in theater marquees, but it did gain a reputation as one of the worst movies ever made—and earned an episode of mockery on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1997\. What really makes the title, of course, is the head-scratching punctuation—!!?—at the end. niennunb ## Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? 
Hard to remember now, but Anthony Newley was a huge star in the '60s, a popular singer/actor/composer, not to mention the husband of Joan Collins. But Newley was apparently disenchanted by his fame and his marriage, and in this autobiographical feature —Newley wrote, directed, produced, starred in, and composed the songs for it—he complains about all of this to his two toddlers (playing themselves). As Merkin, Newley puts particular emphasis on his own womanizing, including relationships with Polyester Poontang (Collins) and Mercy Humppe (Playboy centerfold Connie Kreski), while two ancient Hollywood comics (George Jessel and Milton Berle), representing God and Satan, struggle for his soul. Newley seemed to be aiming for Fellini's 8 1/2, but the result was as self-indulgent and witless as it sounds. ("Polyester Poontang"? "Mercy Humppe"? Puh-leeze.) The movie was a major critical and commercial disaster, helping to hasten the end of Newley's career and his union to Collins. So, in a way, it solved his problems. niennunb ## Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet, and I'm Feeling So Sad 
Maybe not the weirdest long movie title ever derived from a Broadway play (that honor probably belongs to 1972's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds). Thank goodness the film version of Arthur Kopit's Broadway play didn't use the full title (Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad: A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition); no doubt because theater owners would have objected to words like bastard or pseudoclassical. Because the overbearing mom she played in Gypsy wasn't unflattering enough, Rosalind Russell starred in the film as the mother who travels to a Caribbean resort with her shy son (Robert Morse), a sexy babysitter (Barbara Harris, who originated the role in the Off-Broadway version), and her husband's corpse. "This motion picture will probably do as much for mothers as Moby Dick did for whales," boasted the poster. Ha, if only the film had been that memorable. niennunb ## Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex\* (\*But Were Afraid to Ask) 
The 1970s was a heyday for kooky New York characters name-checked in long-winded movie titles: Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basel E. Frankweiler. Surprisingly, Woody Allen didn't take advantage of this trend; his only long-winded title was this anthology inspired by Dr. David Reuben's book of the same title. Allen's version is far less educational than Reuben's; it takes the form of several unrelated sketches, each of which purports to answer a question posed in Reuben's book. The funniest bits are the first and last. The opener, "Do Aphrodisiacs Work?,” is a medieval farce featuring Allen as a court jester and Lynn Redgrave as a queen trapped in a chastity belt. The climactic sketch, "What Happens During Ejaculation?,” stars Allen as a sperm. The rest are hit-and-miss and awfully dated but still pretty hilarious. Allen's $2 million picture scored $18 million at the box office, proving that, when it comes to titles, size doesn't matter. niennunb ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7119868/word-power-10-memorable-movies-with-long-titles/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7119868/word-power-10-memorable-movies-with-long-titles/"},"headline":"Word Power: 10 Memorable Movies With Long Titles","datePublished":"2013-02-12T13:00:28.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T05:49:28.723Z","description":"A short history of some very long-titled movies (or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying About Marketing and Love Our Bomb)","url":"https://time.com/archive/7119868/word-power-10-memorable-movies-with-long-titles/","keywords":["Oscars","Lincoln"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf5efc00b8a2c6b29/698a8f249d83e871bfb9fbbc/to-wong-foo-thanks-for-everything-julie-newmar-original.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Gary Susman","url":"https://time.com/author/gary-susman/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf5efc00b8a2c6b29/698a8f249d83e871bfb9fbbc/to-wong-foo-thanks-for-everything-julie-newmar-original.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Populist: To Wong Foo","caption":"","creditText":"Universal Pictures","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7119868/word-power-10-memorable-movies-with-long-titles/","name":"Word Power: 10 Memorable Movies With Long Titles"}}]}] ```