Movie-A-Day: Dead Man’s Curve – Or, why American movies sometimes need a name change in the UK

Starring: Matthew Lillard, Michael Vartan, Randall Batinkoff, Keri Russell Director: Dan Rosen Year Of Release: 1998 Plot: When Tim and Chris discover than their college gives students automatic A’s for the semester someone’s roommate kills themselves, they decide to murder their roomie Rand and make it look like a suicide, in order to try and take advantage of this loophole. Soon after, his girlfriend also takes her own life and things begin to spin out of control. Tim and Chris begin to get suspicious of one another, while Chris’ girlfriend may somehow be involved too.

It was George Bernard Shaw who once said, ‘England and America are two countries separated by the same language’, and that’s certainly true when it comes to film titles. The presumption is that you should be able to take a film from the US to the UK and not change the name, because both countries speak English and so there shouldn’t be any confusion. However that’s not always true.

While Dead Man’s Curve was the original working title of this guilty pleasure thriller, before it was released in the US they changed the name to simply The Curve. However they kept the initial title in the UK. The reason for the difference is that The Curve has a double mean in the States. It’s both the place where the kids choose to stage a suicide, and also refers to the marking system used in most American universities, which is based on a curve so that a certain percentage gets A’s, a certain percentage B’s and so on. However we don’t use system that much over here in Blighty, so a film named The Curve would be essentially meaningless. At least Dean Man’s Curve means something in the UK, even if it doesn’t exactly suggest young people killing each other at a university.

However it’s certainly not the only movie to get its name changed to avoid cultural confusion. For example the 2001 Paul Walker and Steve Zahn serial killer road flick is called Joy Ride in the US, but in most other English speaking territories it’s known as Road Kill. Neither are actually brilliant titles, but the reason is that in America a Joy Ride is pretty much what it sounds like – a drive taken just for the pleasure of it. However in the UK it’s come to mean youngsters stealing cars and driving around in them. As a result it was decided that Joy Ride had the wrong connotations outside the US (and to be honest, inside the US as well) and so we got Road Kill instead.

There’s also the 1999 Ben Affleck thriller Reindeer Games, which went by its incredibly generic working title of Deception in Britain. The reason is obvious to anyone in the UK, as we don’t use the phrase Reindeer Games at all really, so it would be pretty much meaningless to call a movie that over here. In case you’re wondering what Reindeer Games are, they’re activities that a particular group of people take part in that deliberately exclude others. Perhaps unsurprisingly the phrase is taken from the song Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, and the fact that ‘All of the other reindeer… never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games’. Whatever it means, it’s still a pretty stupid name for a movie, but Deception certainly isn’t any better.

Another name change came for the 1992 caveman-in-the-modern-day comedy Encino Man, starring Brendan Fraser, which became California Man in the UK, as few Brits know that Encino is an area in Los Angeles.

Very occasionally having a different name in Britain and America is designed into the film from the very beginning. That’s what had to happen with the first Harry Potter movie due to the fact they had different titles on either side of the Atlantic when they were first published in book form. Although released as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in Britain, the American publishers felt kids wouldn’t want to read a book with the word ‘Philosopher’ in the name, so it was altered to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. When it came to making the movie version, it was decided they’d keep the titles both countries already knew the book by, but that was more complex than printing slightly different posters for different territories. Several scenes had to be filmed twice, with Harry talking about a sorcerer’s stone for Americans and a philosopher’s stone for Brits (and most other countries too).

Some name changes are more difficult to explain, such as Rob Reiner’s legal drama Ghosts Of Mississippi becoming Ghosts of the Past in Britain. You also have the rather confusing case of the 1974 Burt Reynolds American football prison drama, The Longest Yard, which for some reason they decided to call The Mean Machine in Britain. Then, in 2001, the UK decided to remake the film with Vinnie Jones playing soccer in jail, but kept the British name of the 1974 film when it went to the US. Then, a couple of years later, Hollywood decided it wanted its own remake, with Adam Sandler and Chris Rock, but this time it actually got to the UK under the name The Longest Yard.

There was a similar situation with the Drew Barrymore/Jimmy Fallon movie Fever Pitch in 2005. That was the name the Farrelly Brother’s take on Nick Hornby’s novel (with the sport changed from soccer to baseball) went by in the States, but that wouldn’t really work in Britain as we’d already had our own, far more faithful, film version in 1997, starring Colin Firth. As a result, in most countries the American remake went by the name The Perfect Catch. However, whatever it was called, the movie wasn’t very good.

These are just a few examples of the numerous studio movies that have had a different name in Britain to the US (it’s even more common with indie flicks and foreign films, and with cheap, trashy horror flicks it’s almost par for the course). Ultimately while the filmmakers might have a say in it, it’s normally up to the distributor to decide the title that they feel will be the most commercial name to release a film under in a given territory (which ends up with some oddities in foreign countries, such as China releasing As Good As It Gets as Mr. Cat Poop). Most of the time our common language means Brits and Americans can share film titles, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out.

TIM ISAAC

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