Film titles: The long and short of it

Just what is its title anyway? Shrek Forever After. But billboards and newspaper ads seem to use another name: Shrek: The Final Chapter." More than a few cinemas have just listed it as Shrek 4, perhaps running low on patience, or just colons.

There was a time when summer movies came with tidy, muscular names. Speed. Armageddon. Twister. Now, with studios churning out more sequels than ever, and eager to link their new releases to existing brands or signal a franchise in the making, titles have grown exponentially.

Add in simultaneous 3-D offerings, and splice that into subcategories – Shrek Forever After 3-D, Shrek Forever After: An IMAX 3-D Experience – and the listings become even more confusing.

This summer we have Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Art houses will receive the comedy Happy Thank You More Please. The colon-crazy folks over at Warner Brothers have a movie coming out based on the book series Guardians of Ga'Hoole. But some recent title surgery has made it Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole. It's enough to make Nanny McPhee Returns seem downright spare.

Elaborate titles can bring danger. "The more a title describes the story, the less effective it generally is," says Dennis Rice, a marketing consultant who has held top positions at Miramax, United Artists and Disney. "You want people to know what they're getting. But you also want to leave them wanting to learn more."

And in a very practical sense, wordy titles take up a lot of time in a 15-second television ad and a lot of space on a poster. DreamWorks found a way around that problem with How to Train Your Dragon, however, by simply renaming the film in television commercials. The full title appeared on the screen, but the voice-over at the end urged people to attend Dragons.

None of these titles is selected without debate by studio executives and, in some cases, they are determined by focus group testing. With sequels, the strategy is generally to avoid adding a numeral, and to come up with a subtitle that makes the movie seem less of a rehash and more worthy of standing on its own. It won't be Kung Fu Panda 2, but rather Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom of Doom.

The exception, marketers say, are movies where the genre is more of a draw than the content. People don't come to horror movies as much for the story as for the experience of being scared. So Saw VII is probably just fine. Sex and the City 2 signals to the groups of women who turned the first one into a phenomenon that they have the chance for a repeat girls' night out. (And "Sex and the City: Heading to Dubai to Giggle on Camelback" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.)

In some instances, long titles result from an eagerness of studios to piggyback on a brand that has currency in the marketplace. The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is based on the eponymous video game. It's not Why Did I Get Married Too?, but rather Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? and the releasing studio, Lionsgate, will ask for a correction if you shorten it in a newspaper.

Lionsgate also gave the world Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, although that title stemmed from an effort to distinguish the drama from "Push," a film released nine months earlier.

Title elongation has been building for years. Star Wars is now Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. The summer of 2003 brought Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. Last year there was Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

And filmmakers over the decades have used elaborate titles to convey humour. The short I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney marked Ben Affleck's directing debut in 1993. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan arrived in 2006. And, of course, there was Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb all the way back in 1964 and, three years later, the somewhat less timeless Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad.

But never before have these book-length compound titles been so ubiquitous, and so frequently impenetrable. Perhaps that's why there are signs that some studios and filmmakers are starting to sense an opportunity by swerving toward short and sweet. Amid a sea of punctuation, Salt, a new thriller starring Angelina Jolie, grabs attention. Similarly Inception, the latest from director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight), sticks out like a sore thumb – and that's undoubtedly the point.

Even so, don't expect the movie industry to retreat anytime soon, especially as sequels still rule at the box office. Coming up are The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Hollywood can be accused of many things, but not knowing its audience is not one of them. Recall the German proverb: "Empty heads are very fond of long titles."