Title drops in movies

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

I'm imagining some film school student explaining how Barbie would have been a better movie, a real film even, without mentioning the character's name.

Including “It” on the list made it seem like a parody.

They could have just named the character and avoided this too

In The Ghost Writer the main character's name is never mentioned.

Exactly. If they had limited it to cases where "it" is referring to Pennywise, that would be one thing, but not when anyone uses a very common pronoun!

Barbie could be en even better movie if one did a shot each time the name was heard.

I guess this is the downside of making a data analysis thing as a side project to hopefully get something going, but not having the time to take care of all potential edge cases.

I guess "Them!" is also affected by this, and maybe The Thing or The Birds...

I think it's quite interesting to include. Apparently Barbie says "Barbie" more than It says "it", which is fascinating!

I’ve never seen It, but having seen Barbie, it’s not all that surprising lol.

Fight Club, either.

whole conversation makes me just think: But how can we not say it, if we don't know what it is!

Ni!

Have you stopped scrolling once you realized that? The article acknowledges that, and even has a special category of movies named after characters with just a single title drop.

That said, Barbie is a funny case indeed, as it's named after about half of its characters :P

And Layer Cake

That would make it a Fatal Attraction.

Yes, but it would've been much more interesting to read about title drops where this is not the case. The top titledrops listed that are not names of a character are all names of something else, like locations or objects.

This is IMO one of the coolest use cases of AI. With a half-decent prompt, an LLM is pretty good at tasks like those.

The problem is that there aren't any lists for title drops excluding boring cases like that. So all the lists get dominated by those cases.

I agree, I think this analysis can benefit from some data sanitisation.

It is a silly one to include, because the word it is picked up by their analysis. Need to remove all hits except where the characters are referencing Pennywise directly.

I also noticed that in some cases a namedrop was registered where the eponymous character speaks, e.g. ALIENS: hisses. These need to be removed as well.

Movies where the name of the movie is the name of the leading character needs to be removed as well, or at least filterable from the list.

All of this makes the site a little less interesting imo. A good title drop in a movie is a fun little easter egg, especially if the name a bit more conceptual, e.g. The Phantom Menace. The way this site is set up at the moment makes it a bit more difficult to find those really good title drops.

Might acknowledge, but fails to fix. For instance, leading genre is biography since they aren't excluding 'name dropping'.

Indeed, and this contaminates all other analyses as well. Sure, shorter titles are dropped more frequently – but that sounds like it could be just because character names tend to make for short titles.

Both you and GP seem to have stopped reading the article early...

He specifically calls out `"real"` title drops just a few sections later.

after doing a naive approach he then drills down into more proper title drops.

Now watch Rebecca.

To be fair, the article starts out seeming real for about the first third. It's only after the first list — Barbie, Damini, Sita,... Azhar, It — that it descends into obvious parody. Quote:

"What's interesting about the (Fiction) list 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."

Here the writer slides seamlessly from talking about movies with title drops to talking about movies with single-word titles which are also the name of the main character, but is still saying things like "What's interesting about this list..." and "...an international phenomenon," as if those are remotely the defining characteristics of the list he just gave. (The defining characteristic, again, is "movies named after the protagonist." That's all.)

Then there's a section break. Since the article clearly outed itself as parody right before the break, I think it's totally reasonable for anyone to stop reading it at that point. (Although maybe not 100% reasonable to come back and comment on HN about it, except maybe to express disappointment and save other people the bother of reading that far themselves.)

Anyway, after the break the author says, "You might have noticed [an icon on each movie that is] named after one of its characters." But scroll back up and you'll see that icon is missing from 4 of the movies in that list of 10: "Saina", "Nussa", "Arif v. 216", and "It". Of those 4, 3 are clearly named after a main character. The fourth (like "Ecks vs. Sever") is named after two characters (Arif and 216) but the graph shows that the author is counting instances of the name "Arif" alone, not instances of the phrase "Arif v 216".

So not only is the article trying to be funny, it's not even playing by consistent rules — it's a parody of an academic paper but also just flat-out lying about the data! That's not only annoying but uncool.

I would actually be interested in reading a real article on the phenomenon of title drops in movies, e.g. by someone who'd gone through a bunch of movies and tallied which of them contain title drops. But the linked article is just garbage.

It's implied that his name is "Jack," assuming the poetry written from the point of view of Jack's organs were an earlier coping mechanism for the MC.

This seems like something that could be handled easily with a second-pass on the data using an LLM. And the author has made the dataset available... [0]

[0] https://www.titledrops.net/

What a pessimistic view.