Exactly. Marquee space is limited. I saw a few around my way that simply put Indiana Jones 4 on the marquee and for the SW prequels put Star Wars: Episode 1/2/3
Transformers: The Dark of the Moon The Dark Knight Rises Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol OK... Hollywood just has a secret contest going to see who can come up with the goofiest title for a blockbuster movie, right?
Teenage Mutanat Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold I find these titles worse than the ones you have listed.
I still think X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE has them all beat. Why not just call the damned thing WOLVERINE? Or are they saving that title for a good movie?
I forgot about X-Men Origins: Wolverine (or at least I tried to scrub it from my brain). Along those lines is Captain America: The First Avenger or The First Avenger: Captain America.
Wasn't that a rights issue? That if FOX didn't make an X-men movie in a certain amount of time, they would lose the rights?
It's also a matter of recognition. Like I pointed out in the Dark Knight Rises thread, movies have to be marketed at people who aren't already familiar with the characters; the established fanbase will come anyway. Call a film just Wolverine and a lot of people would think it was about the animal or maybe a sports team. It's just good branding to identify it as part of the X-Men franchise so that potential audiences will know, "Oh, it's that Wolverine."
"Ghost Protocol" doesn't seem all that memorable and I don't see people using it. I didn't even remember it and had to refer back to the original post twice. I agree with others that this'll most likely be known as "Mission Impossible 4" or "MI4". Or they can just say "Mission Impossible". It's not like the person at the register is going to say "Which one?"
No one goes up to the ticket counter and asks to buy tickets for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. They usually just say Star Trek. I've heard people getting tickets to the latest Bond movie just ask for James Bond.
The other thing about this title which brings out my inner pedant is the placing of the colon. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol would make more sense. I know that the title of the series has always been Mission: Impossible, not Mission Impossible. But Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol makes it sound like this is a mission about an impossible supernatural protocol. Think about it. Say it out loud.
I assume it's Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol. There's no law that says a title has to be limited to one colon. (Indeed, several of my Trek novel titles have more than one, like Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Buried Age: A Tale of The Lost Era.) And who cares what people say when they ask for a ticket? Since when was that the only determining factor in choosing a title? Titling a story is an act of creativity. It's about choosing a word or phrase that's evocative of the substance, feel, or themes of the work. A story's title is its title regardless of whether people actually speak it aloud in the same form. For instance, we refer to Jonathan Swift's most famous work as Gulliver's Travels even though its full title is Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon and then a Captain of several Ships. (The conceit was that it was a nonfiction traveller's tale written by Captain Gulliver. Swift's authorship was supposed to be kept secret, though it came out shortly before publication. So it's not actually Gulliver's Travels so much as "Gulliver's Travels," akin to "Ovid's Metamorphoses" or "Plato's Republic.")
Well, I'm sure the official logo will have them on separate lines, separate fonts, or the like to differentiate them. Personally, I think it's an interesting title. I'm curious to know what it means, and that's part of what makes a good title. If they'd just called it M:I4, all that would say is "this is the next unit churned out by the assembly line." It wouldn't say anything about it as a distinct story. Although it's ironic that this is the film to break from the generic, assembly-line titling, because this is the only M:I film that really has any creative continuity with its predecessor, since Abrams is producing and wrote the story, even though it has a different director and screenwriters. It isn't really an assembly line when each product is so distinct from the others. The first film was a Brian DePalma paranoid thriller, the second was a John Woo action thriller, the third was Alias on a feature budget. Which is exactly why their generic, numbered titles are so inadequate and unrevealing. This one will hopefully be distinctly a Brad Bird film, since Brad Bird films to date have been consistently excellent, but it will have an Abrams influence as well.
Regarding the first movie the agents are trained so they disappear like ghosts. Maybe the movie deals with an agent who has to disappear for awhile
None of them were good. Or, rather, they were fun -- but none of them were "Mission: Impossible" in anything but name. I mean, to start off the first movie by turning Jim Phelps into a TRAITOR? Come on. And Cruise even had that line in the first film "they saw us coming".... No one EVER saw the IMF coming. The series is a hyped up steroidal spy flick in the Bourne mode, but it's not *my* "Mission: Impossible." And they're also scientifically ludicrous. MI used to stretch what was scientifically feasible at the time, but they wouldn't actually do anything like "we can stop his heart with a shock, thus stopping the heart-beat–sensitive explosive, and then start his heart again with the same electrical shock" stuff that is totally medically bogus.
Quite true. They were Brian DePalma Spy Movie, John Woo Spy Movie, and J. J. Abrams Spy Movie -- though the third film did have some pretty good homages to M:I, since that's part of Abrams's style. Which I sometimes regret. In watching the show, I've often thought it would've been cool if there had been a recurring anti-IMF team, a group of enemy agents who did the same sort of thing the IMF did and was occasionally pitted against them. It would've been nice to see episodes where the team's job was to expose and thwart someone else's scam rather than perpetrate their own, just to mix it up some. And there were one or two episodes where someone caught onto the IMF after the fact. "The Ransom" in the first season has Dan Briggs approached by a mobster who somehow knows who he is and what he does (perhaps due to some prior interaction, though it's clear they've never directly met before), and who's kidnapped a friend's daughter in order to force Briggs and his team to do his dirty work. And there's a final-season episode where a character the team brought down in an earlier episode returns and kidnaps Jim Phelps to get revenge on him or something. Ohh, they did sillier things than that on occasion. "Zubrovnik's Ghost" in the first season looked like it was going to be about the team exposing a fraudulent medium, but it turned out the ghost was real and it drove the bad guys to their deaths. And they sometimes used robots and computers that were far too advanced for the time, or even for our time.