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Mon 25 May 2026 22:15, UK
Since it gets slapped on posters, trailers, and marquees, it shouldn’t need to be said that a movie’s title is one of the most important parts of the process. There have been some great movies with awful monikers, but when a shit film has a terrible name, then it’s basically doomed from the start.
Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow is one of the better sci-fi blockbusters of the last decade or so, but when the people involved are claiming that such a generic title may have impacted its chances at the box office and robbed it of the sequel that it probably should have gotten, you have to say they’ve got a point.
Quantum of Solace? Shit title, shit film. Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)? Good movie, unnecessarily long title, which is why everyone calls it Birdman, and you can make the exact same point about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, too.
At the other end of the quality spectrum, there have been plenty of movies where all it takes is one glance at the title to know that it won’t be good. Did anyone really see Sex Lives of the Potato Men, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, or Zyzzyx Road and think a masterpiece was in the offing? Hopefully not, especially when you can count the number of people who paid to see that last one on two hands.
Roger Ebert watched an awful lot of movies in his lifetime, and it says a lot about nomenclature that he struggled to think of any that had a worse title than a 2009 musical comedy that he described as “a cheerless and sullen experience,” one that was “badly written and inertly directed, with actors who don’t have a clue what drives their characters.”
Based on that, it could have been called anything, and he still would have loathed it. It’s an admittedly descriptive and self-explanatory title, but co-writer and director Todd Louiso’s The Marc Pease Experience left the legendary critic equally baffled by its content as by what it was called.
“This is one of those rare films that contains no chemistry at all. None,” he ranted in a one-star review. “The actors scarcely seem to be in the same scenes together.” Not what you’d want from a film that stars Jason Schwartzman in the title role with support from Ben Stiller and Anna Kendrick, but that was just one of Ebert’s many issues.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
“For that matter, I can’t think of many titles that are worse,” he opined. “Marc Pease is a name that looks like a typo, and Marc has no experience other than allegedly existing during the events of the film. Oh, at the end, he becomes more philosophical and human, but that’s just the screenplay jerking his chain. There is no sense that a human is involved.”
If you can say one positive thing about The Marc Pease Experience, title and all, it’s that it does at least live up to its billing by following Marc Pease through his experience, which in this case is trying to relive his high school glory days as a musician. Apart from that, though, Ebert didn’t have a kind word to say, even if it may not be the most stupidly titled movie ever made, since there are plenty of other contenders.
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