A Short Tribute To Long Movie Titles

These days, films say it all in a word as Hollywood’s top honors over the decades increasingly have beenawarded to the industry’s one-word wonders.

- Don Steinberg

Movie titles these days tend to be economical and terse (Inferno, Arrival, Moonlight, Loving). They keep it short. We’re all busy.

But some of this year’s films bring a touch of nostalgia. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them are throwbacks to an era when movie titles were packed with detail and a lot less boring — a convention more common in the let-it-all-hang-out 1960's and ’70s.

Both of these 2016 films’ names are taken from the books that inspired them, presold titles that would be crazy to abandon. But keeping the lengthy literary title isn’t a requirement. The novel The Price of Salt became Carol. The memoir A Long Way Home plays onscreen as Lion. Arrival is based on a science fiction story called “Story of Your Life.”