Overwhelming Verbosity

This article discusses what I see as a growing annoyance in movie titles, and was inspired by a similar MilkPlus article that explores the gerund-name title device.

Movie titles are too long these days. Or, many of them are. While films like Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World can't hold a candle to 1990s oddities The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain or The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom, it seems that verbose movie titles are becoming more and more popular.

Most of them seem to have the '[series title]: [entry title]' format - or the slightly different '[series title] and [entry title]' - but there still remain others like the troubling Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Let's count the recent and upcoming films with terribly verbose titles, shall we? We have...

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Tom Dowd and the Language of Music
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Story
The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

(along with many other somewhat verbose titles like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and Benji Returns: Rags to Riches and whatever the Pirates sequel ends up being called)

Now, I can understand the reasoning here in the case of a series: studios want the name recognition. But don't you think The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is going just a bit much?

Of course, this is nothing new. The same thing happened in the 70s with the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies. But really, would Harry Potter 3 be seen by any fewer people if it was called simply The Prisoner of Azkaban, or, well, Harry Potter 3? When talking about it, nobody says The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, they just say Return of the King, so wouldn't that title work? Thank God we aren't getting Spider-Man 2: The Wrath of Doctor Octopus this summer.

I guess I'm just saying this epidemic had better stop soon, or we'll have another The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies on our hands, and no one wants that.