Title drops in movies

gaws | 476 points

While the 1995 Japanese anime series, Neon Genesis Evangelion revolves around human-shaped weapons called "Evangelions", the "Neon Genesis" part of the title is neither part of the original Japanese name, nor its direct translation. The Japanese name is 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン / Shin-seiki evangerion, "Evangelion of a new era/century". The series has other non-direct translations too, and apparently this style was approved of the original creators, but it was always a bit of a mystery whether the gap in the interpretation was intentional or not.

However, over two decades later, with the re-boot movie series Rebuild of Evangelion, in the final scenes of the final movie, the protagonist name-drops the words "neon genesis" in appropriate context. I've never grinned as hard in movie theater.

GolDDranks | 18 hours ago

Intentionality matters. "It" should not count as a title drop. Nor Barbie (or any movie where the title is the characters name). But I understand it would be way more difficult to run the numbers with such a constraint. But this is a case where, to me, the results are very much tainted and thus I had to stop reading. To me this is like when developers run into a hard issue and somehow play a game of semantics with the wording of a ticket to avoid putting together something useful for the user

darepublic | 13 hours ago

Including films where the title is a character name makes the data set less interesting. “Barbie title-drops a ton!” yeah ok.

vundercind | a day ago

How sure are we that these so-called title drops are what this article purports them to be rather than the name of the film coming from the content and/or dialogue that is contained within it?

An analogy: when someone writes a song and then they need to name it, they will frequently choose a word or phrase that appears in the lyrics. When Leonard Cohen sings “hallelujah” in the song of the same name, is that a “title drop”? I assume not.

adriand | 15 hours ago

> 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 (feel free to hover over the visualizations to explore the matches)!

An unacknowledged partial title drop for that movie is that "Lord of the Ring" (with no s at the end) is uttered.

bananaflag | 20 hours ago

sometimes the title is in the script, but isn't actually a line said by anyone:

Aliens (1986)

(Aliens hissing)

https://www.titledrops.net/explorer?movies=tt0090605&title=

test1235 | 20 hours ago

How about movies where the title drop is the very last line? I can only think of one (it's not really a spoiler, but SPOILERS I guess).

The last line of My Dinner with Andre is "my dinner with Andre." I think that only works because the whole movie feels like a stage play, and there's something very stagey about that choice.

throw4847285 | 5 hours ago

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

What is much more interesting is that 11.5% of movies named after their protagonist never mention them by name. I guess I can imagine a few edge cases where this would be usual (protagonists not usually called by their name due to their position, like kings, and movies with little talking), but it's surprising that there are that many.

Sebb767 | 14 hours ago

I was utterly disturbed by a story sent into the Kermode and Mayo radio show many years ago. The listener explained that their family went to the theatre, sat down in their seats to watch the film, and then upon the first utterance of the title of the film they would clap, stand up, and walk out.

I assume this to be a joke. I've never found any reference of anybody doing this online, or anybody even discussing this one story from the show. But holy shit does it make my skin crawl.

savef | 19 hours ago

Maybe I was (un)lucky, but the only film I've checked was "Inception". It's spoken at 19:24, but the explorer states the title is not dropped at all. I had to actually look it up, as I've doubted my memory for a second.

darekkay | 18 hours ago

Just dropping in to say thank you! Fun read, fun idea, well executed.

Smells like the old internet!

Runpee.com for when best to pee during a long film, Mr Skin for nude scenes (Flesh of The Stars in Knocked up fiction) … and titledrops.net for title drops.

devonsolomon | 21 hours ago

https://youtu.be/OiqPmsBYieA?feature=shared i had the titular line in star wars...

chrisallick | 20 hours ago

What a fun read! I should point out though that the movie Saina definitely needs a "name" icon next to it, as it's a biopic of badminton player Saina Nehwal.

shrikant | a day ago

I favor those dramatic Gaspar Noe title drops, the title in huge red letters full screen, over characters naming the title. It's huge.

But then opensubtitles couldn't be used to analyse that.

rurban | 20 hours ago

There's a parody account on Twitter that I dearly love for these. In particular: https://x.com/Saythetitle/status/909933269982105605

(It's a shame there's no nice way on Twitter to sort by number of favorites. You can approximate it by searching for "from:<accountname> min_faves:<number>", but it doesn't correct for the number of followers the person had at a given point. Which is a problem with subreddit "top" sorting, come to think of it, as it strongly weights recent posts when the subreddit was more popular. Always wished they'd fix that.)

jml7c5 | 9 hours ago

The hardest name drop of the last decade has got to be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln6ZxXSnMwg (Massive spoilers for Last Fiction 16).

Yes, it's a game, but from one of two series that cemented video games as a cinematic medium, when developers so desire. 35 years of build-up, and a love letter to the whole series, including (especially) the ones people derided (FNC). Also, interesting because it's not a direct quote of the title, but still something that everyone who got to this point recognized immediately.

frmersdog | 9 hours ago

one of my favorites is Robocop 2 (1990):

> 00:23:19 it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you, Robocop 2

evil-olive | 20 hours ago

A pointed reversal of this is "We Need to Talk About Kevin", which went unsaid through the movie.

NiloCK | 13 hours ago

Does this not take in to account lyrics in musical movies? I looked up Across the Universe and it reported zero name drops despite there being at least a dozen.

gothroach | 5 hours ago

“That’s the name of the movie!” - most Pitch Meeting videos

nighthawk454 | 20 hours ago

The Elephant (2003) has my favorite Title drop, and of course, is not marked in this database. As I remember it, at some point in the movie we are shown a drawing of an elephant randomly hanging in the room of one of the protagonists. Both the drawing, and the main protagonists are easy to ignore, yet are the main subjects of the movie.

cezart | 17 hours ago

Fake title drops is one of my favorite memes, which is a screenshot from a movie/series with fake subtitles. Example:

https://preview.redd.it/in-the-netflix-original-series-resid...

edit: oops, just noticed the article also mentions the meme

badmintonbaseba | 12 hours ago

"What, we some kinda... Suicide Squad?" (◔_◔)

redundantly | 19 hours ago

Some movies have a working title and the release is different. We may never know how many title drops are in those. Although we know that the working title for "The Dark Knight" was "Rory's First Kiss".

bux93 | 18 hours ago

There was an Instagram account or YouTube channel that used to make funny videos of the films ending with the credits rolling at the exact point the title of the film was said—anyone have any recollection of that?

r0bbbo | 17 hours ago

A bug: In "Highest title drops by decade", 1960, "Best rated (at least 1 drop)", it lists Psycho with 0 drops. It really does seem to be 0, so shouldn't show up here.

mkl | 18 hours ago

Reminded me of a scene in Barry¹ where the title character gets a small part in a movie and while his washed-up teacher is reviewing the script he sees Barry’s single line of dialogue and exclaims “That’s the name of the movie! They can’t cut that!”

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_(TV_series)

latexr | 15 hours ago

Patrick, you're the American psycho!

I really like a credit drop a la Gaspar Noe just rolling the credits mid way through Climax.

I like the idea of a surrealist scene in a restaurant where the credits are just tucked away in a menu. Maybe it's been done

mhh__ | 20 hours ago

For as cheesy as the Fast and Furious movies are they still haven't really done this with the exception of Tokyo Drift I think.

racl101 | 9 hours ago

It's actually well executed how they managed to say exactly once "Amadeus" or "Patton" in their biographical films.

undebuggable | 19 hours ago

One of my favorite title drops is in Arrested Development:

Michael Bluth: "Your average American male is in a perpetual state of adolescence, you know, arrested development"

Narrator: "Hey! Thats the name of the show"

locusofself | 20 hours ago

Wow I love the presentation of this website, very nice!

mobeigi | 15 hours ago

Love data x film. https://stephenfollows.substack.com/ does a lot of this kind of work.

alexnew | 19 hours ago

Oh my god this seems like so much work. I'm exhausted on their behalf.

MPSimmons | 10 hours ago

Most ridiculous one has to be "I have my 50 shades of grey" or something like that dropped in the same movie.

I only know this because of the fun honest reviews made of it.

epolanski | 18 hours ago

The one in Hot Tub Time Machine will never stop being funny to me.

julianeon | 10 hours ago

I would've liked 2d charts or at least stacked bar charts for the correlation ones to see if the correlations are different for ones with only one drop or many drops

KTibow | 21 hours ago

Indian Movies had this trend since early days till lates 90s Every movie has 1 dialogue 1 song That says title of movie

G_o_D | 17 hours ago
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| 15 hours ago
TMWNN | 3 hours ago

Isn't "Dune" said once in both of the Villeneuve movies?

arethuza | 16 hours ago

“A View to a Kill (1985)” The database does not recognise when the movie name is spoken by 2 people. In this movie 1 character begins the sentence “what a view…” and a 2nd character completes the line: “…to a kill”.

nickdothutton | 5 hours ago

Happy to see Damini movie in that list. It's an excellent Bollywood movie from the 90s. I know the list is not indicative of the quality of the movie. But still happy to see this obscure Indian movie. Worth a watch. Highly rated on IMDB too.

sidcool | 18 hours ago

Brokeback Mountain apparently has 0 title drops, even though all Ennis and Jack have is Brokeback Mountain!

-t0mm | 18 hours ago

Unfortunately he'll miss e.g. "I'm sick and tired of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane."

edgineer | 14 hours ago

"I'm just so tired of all these star wars"

jdlyga | 10 hours ago

Sometimes the title is added after the script

yieldcrv | 11 hours ago

I just came here to say I love the bulgy animation as you scrub through the movie to see the drops.

This is a fun idea but I also appreciate the extra effort to make it nice to explore!

jonplackett | 17 hours ago

I remember about 12-15 years ago, as a weekend project, I reached out to the creator of OpenSubtitles dot org and asked him for a dump of all the subtitles, which he promptly and happily provided. I then indexed them all in elasticsearch (it was a pretty nascent tech at the time), and created a movie quote finder, with timestamps. E.g. you could search for "i love you" and it would tell you all the movies and timestamps that phrase would be uttered. My lazy ass didn't go beyond a localhost version, but I still remember fondly of having gotten that working, it felt like magic at the time.

gnrlst | 18 hours ago
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| 20 hours ago

what is title drops ? what doest it mean ?

Avlin67 | 16 hours ago

[dead]

TheRealNGenius | 21 hours ago

[dead]

TheRealNGenius | 21 hours ago

well educative for people from creative fields

JimmyWilliams1 | 20 hours ago

The movie It doesn’t have as many title drops as I would’ve expected. Also I don’t recall anyone ever saying The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in that film.

alehlopeh | a day ago