Movie and TV projects switch titles for all different kinds of reasons. Sometimes a name is used as a placeholder until a better one comes along, other times a behind-the-scenes dispute can result in some last-minute alterations. In the end, it’s probably for the better, but it’s still pretty funny to see what we came close to getting at one point. Here are a few proposed titles that didn’t make it to the final stretch.
10. BLAZING SADDLES
Before they landed on Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’s classic 1974 Western parody went by the name of Tex X, a mashup of the popular cowboy nickname “Tex” and the surname of civil rights activist Malcolm X.
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9. HANCOCK
Vy Vincent Ngo’s script for what eventually became 2008’s Hancock was originally called Tonight, He Comes. The title stuck around for over a decade, but was changed just before shooting began.
8. MARRIED… WITH CHILDREN
The long-running Fox sitcom Married… With Children was pitched under the working title Not the Cosbys to distance itself from the other wholesome, family-friendly comedies on TV at the time.
7. DUMB AND DUMBER
According to director Peter Farrelly, everyone kept turning down the Dumb and Dumber script because of the title. They temporarily changed it to A Power Tool is Not a Toy and finally managed to get people to read it.
6. CLERKS II
Kevin Smith initially wanted to call the first Clerks sequel The Passion of the Clerks to spoof Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. When Smith realized the joke would be dated by the time the movie came out, he had to fight Harvey Weinstein to switch it to Clerks II.
5. IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA
On a 2022 episode of The Always Sunny Podcast, cast members Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton revealed that they think It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a terrible name for a show. The title that was closer to the top of their list of possibilities was Jerks, which they decided against because it sounded too cute and reductive.
4. SOME LIKE IT HOT
Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot was known as Not Tonight, Josephine! in its early stages. During one scene in the final film, Jack Lemmon’s character uses the phrase in reference to an old joke about Napoleon Bonaparte refusing sex with his wife.
3. HAPPY GILMORE
Studio executives tried to strong-arm Adam Sandler into calling his 1996 golf movie Hole in Fun, but he wasn’t having it. They settled on naming the movie after the main character, who was named after a friend of Sandler’s co-star, Allen Covert.
2. BACK TO THE FUTURE
While Back to the Future was in production, an executive at Universal kept pressuring the filmmakers to call the movie Spaceman From Pluto as a nod to a comic book seen in the film. Steven Spielberg intervened, thanking the executive for his “humorous memo” and successfully preventing the change from happening.
1. ANNIE HALL
Woody Allen and his Annie Hall co-writer Marshall Brickman had a difference of opinion when it came to what the title of their 1977 movie should be. Allen preferred Anhedonia, but Brickman had other ideas. His suggestions? Me and My Goy and It Had to Be Jew.
