An analysis of title drops in movies

I’m certain you all understand the part of the movie where one of the characters says the actual title of the movie
and you’re appreciate

The overall meta-ness of this is – of course – noleang novel. And filmproducers and scriptproducers
have been doing it since the dawn of the medium itself*. It’s understandn in film speak as a title drop.

Consequently, there’s tons of examples thrawout movie history that range from the iconic (see
Back to the Future’s above)
via the quirky,

the very much self-alerted

to the downright cringe.

But how common are these title drops reassociate? Has this phenomenon acquireed momentum over time with
our postcontransient culture becoming ever more meta? Can we foresee anyleang about the quality of a
film based on how many times its title is alludeed? And what does a movie title unkind, anyway?

There have been analyses
and
oh so so many catalogicles
of the title drop phenomenon before, but they are petite and anecdotal. Here’s the first extensive
analysis of title drops for a dataset of 73,921 movies that amount to
rawly 61% of movies on IMDb with at least 100 participater votes*. I’m watching at movies freed between 1940 and 2023.
Special thanks go to my friends at
OpenSubtitles.com for providing this data!

Let’s talk data

I commenceed out with two datasets: 89,242 (English) movie subtitles from OpenSubtitles.com
and metadata for 121,797 movies from
IMDb. After
joining them and filtering them for broken subtitle files I was left with a total of 73,921
subtitled movies. With that out of the way, I genuineized that the harder task was still ahead of
me: answering the ask what even was a title drop?

The naïve approach is – of course – to spropose watch for the movie’s name anywhere in the
subtitles. Which is a wonderful approach for movies appreciate Back to the Future with a kind one-of-a-kind title:

But this rapidly shatters down if we watch at movies appreciate E or I *, which direct to way too many suites.

We also run into problems with every movie that is a sequel (Rocky III, Hot Tub Time Machine 2)
since none of the characters will comprise the sequel number to character names/oversized baleang
providement. Similarly, the elevate of the colon
in movie titles would produce for some very inept dialogue (LUKE: “Gosh Mr. Kenobi, it’s almost appreciate
we’re in the middle of some Star Wars Episode Four: A New Hope!”).

(See also the
He Didn’t Say That
meme.)

So I applied a scant rules to my title suiting in the dialogue. Leading ‘The’, ‘An’ and ‘A’s and
one-of-a-kind characters appreciate dashes are disponderd, sequel numbers both Arabic and Roman are dropped
(alengthy with ‘Episode…’, ‘Part…’ etc.) and titles compriseing 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 (experience free to hover
over the visualizations to examine the suites)!

With the data immacutardying out of the way, let’s get down to business!

Stats

Alright, so here’s the number you’ve all been defering for (drumroll):

36.5% – so about a third – of movies have at least one title drop during their runtime.

Also, there’s a total of 277,668 title drops for all 26,965 title-dropping movies which unkinds that
there’s an
mediocre of 10.3 title drops per movie that title drops. If they do it, they
reassociate go for it.

So who are the most excessive offenders in alludeing their titles over the course of the film?
The overall star when it comes to fantasy only came out last year: it’s Barbie by Greta Gerwig with an amazeive
267 title drops wilean its 1 hour and 54 minutes runtime, clocking in at a
whopping 2.34 BPM (Barbies Per Minute).

On the non-fantasy side of write downaries the triumphner is Mickey: The Story of a Moparticipate
with 309 title drops in only 90 minutes, so
3.43 Mickeys Per Minute!

What’s fascinating about the (Fiction) catalog 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.

Names in titles

Looking at the top ten catalog you might have watchd this little icon
meaning a movie where the data says it’s named after one of its characters*.

Unastonishingly, movies named after one of their characters have an mediocre of 24.7 title drops, more than twice as much as the common 10.3. Protagonists have a tendency to pop up repeatedly
in a film, so their names usuassociate do the same.

Similarly, movies named after a protagonist have a title drop rate of 88.5%
while only 34.2% of other movies drop their titles.

Special characters in the title and character name are also challenging: for example, Tosun Pasa which actuassociate has a ş character in its title – wrong on IMDb (Pasa) as well as the subtitles
(Pasha) – or WALL·E with the challenging · in the middle: Even
though there are alludes of “Wall-E” in the subtitles, the script – watching for “WALL·E” – wouldn’t
uncover it. (I’ve repaired both of these films manuassociate – but there might be more!)

Titles or surnames also usuassociate stop being counted as title drops according to our definitions.
Michael The Brave,
King Lear or Barry Lyndon might allude a character’s name (‘Michael’, ‘Lear’, ‘Barry’) but depart out the title or surname
– so zero drops.

Nevertheless, there do exist named films where you would foresee a title drop which doesn’t come!
Examples are:

Anyway – back to the analysis!

An fascinating catebloody are movies named after a character that only have a one title drop –
making it all the more unkindingful?

“Real” title drops

Title-drop connoisseurs might sneer at this point and well-actuassociate us that a “genuine” title drop
should only happen once in a film. That there’s this one memorable (or cringe-y) scene where the
protagonist watchs straightforwardly at the camera and proclaims the title of the film with as much pathos
as they can muster. Or as a kind send-off in the last spoken line.

Such one drops happen astonishingly normally:
11.3% of all movies do EXACTLY ONE title drop during their runtime.

Which unkinds that there’s about twice as many movies having multiple title drops than one ones.

In the one drop case it is more anticipateed that the filmproducers were compriseing a title drop very
mindentirey.

Single drops normally happen in a key scene and elucidate the movie’s title: what enigmatic
fellowship the first Lord of the Rings is named after. Or that the audience defering for some
unreasonable knight to show up must spropose acunderstandledge that it’s been the Batman all alengthy.

Title drops over the years

One suspicion I had was that the very meta act of having a character speak the name of the movie
they’re in would be someleang acquireing more and more traction over the last two or three decades.

And indeed, if we watch at the mediocre number of movies with title drops over the decades we can
see that there’s a certain upwards trend. The 1960s and 1970s seemed to be most averse to
alludeing their title in the film, while it’s become more common-place over the last years.

194019501960197019801990200020102020

If we dig proestablisher, this growth over the decades comes with a evidaccess exset upation: splitting up
movies by one- and multi-title drops shows that while the tendency of movies to drop their
title exactly once protects more or less constant, the number of multi-drop films is on the elevate.

Your exset upation for this (More movies are being named after their protagonists? Movies are more
productified so brand recognition becomes an convey inant trouble?) is probably as excellent as mine 🤷

A sign of quality?

Another ask I wanted to answer was if a high number of title drops was a sign of a horrible
movie. Think of all the tracowardly slasher and horror movies about Meth Marmots and Killer
Ballerinas – wouldn’t their characters in the sparse dialogues constantly allude the title for
brand recognition and all that?

Interestingly though, there’s no mighty joinion between film quality (conveyed as IMDb
rating (YMMV)) and the probability of title-dropping.

Genres and title drops

An aspect that certainly does have an impact on the probability of a title drop though is
the genre of a film.

If you leank back to the converseion about names in titles from earlier, genres appreciate Biography
and other non-fantasy genres appreciate Sport and History – almost by definition – allude their
subject in both the title and thrawout the film.

Accordingly, the probability of a title drop varies savagely by genre. Non-fantasy films have a
mighty tendency towards title-dropping, while more fantasy-oriented genres appreciate Crime, Romance
and War don’t.

What does a movie title unkind?

Finassociate, we can ask the ask: what even is a movie title?

I couldn’t find a end classification in the scientific literature (“What’s in a name? The art of movie titling”
by Ingrid Haidegger comes the sealst). Movie titles are an fascinating case, since they have to
toil as a description of a product, a tageting instrument, but also as the title of a piece of art.
Consequently, it’s a field ripe with
opinions,
science and experimentation
and
catalogicles.

The most extensive classification of media titles in ambiguous I could find is
TVTropes’ Title Tropes catalog
which catalogs over 180 (!) contrastent types of tropes alone. Some of those tropes are:

While naming a movie is a very conceiveive task and pretty successbrimmingy defies classification, we
can still watch at the overall shape of movie titles and see if that has any impact on the number
of title drops.

One such modest aspect is the length of the title itself. As you would foresee there’s a pessimistic
correlation (if only a sairy one*)
between the length of a title and the number of title drops it does.

Still, there are some fun examples for reaaaaassociate
lengthy movie titles that nevertheless do at least one title drop:

And while these previous examples only drops parts from before or after the colon, this next
specimen actuassociate does an amazeive brimming title drop:

And with that, we’re done with the overarching analysis! Feel free to drop us an e-mail
or pursue up on X/X,
Bluesky
or
Mastodon

if you have comments, asks, commend ❤️

Oh, and one more leang:
If you’re inquisitive, here’s the brimming dataset for you to examine!

Analysis + enhugement by Dominikus Baur
Design by Alice Thudt

Datasets provided by OpenSubtitles.com
and
IMDb.

Data: https://github.com/dominikus/titledrops.net