It's All In The Title UPDATE!

A while back I wrote about Edge Of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise's recent scifi action opus and its horrible, horrible title. 

In brief, I thought the title was bland and told you absolutely nothing about the story and predicted it would hurt the film's box office. It ended up making $370 million worldwide, which sounds like a lot to you and me, but isn't all that much in the movie biz. Just think how much more it could have made if people knew what it was about.

The film was based on a popular manga called All You Need Is Kill. So why didn't they use that odd, but much better title? Supposedly they were going to, but Warner Bros. president Sue Kroll gets icky bad feelings when she sees or hears the word "kill," hence the change to incredibly bland and vanilla Edge Of Tomorrow moniker. Sadly, I'm not kidding.

It's beginning to look like I'm not the only one who hated the title. This week Warner Bros. revealed the DVD/Blu Ray art for the movie, and it looks for all the world like they've changed the title again.

It appears to have retroactively been renamed Live, Die, Repeat. This was formerly the film's tagline, but it now seems to have been promoted to the full title. It's still not a particularly good name, but at least it gives you a vague idea of what the movie's about, and it's a thousand times better than the previous one.

Note that Edge Of Tomorrow is still on the cover, but it's been relegated to the very bottom, after the stars' names. Confusing!

The spine would seem to indicate that the official title is now Live, Die, Repeat / Edge Of Tomorrow. I guess Live, Die, Repeat / Edge Of Tomorrow / Being A Fictional Moving Photoplay In Which Tom Cruise, Favorite Actor Of The Masses And The Ostensible Star Of The Opus, Battles Strange Beings Of An Unsavory Sort From Another World And Is Tragically Killed Over And Over, Only To Find Himself Resurrected The Next Day, Much Like Our Lord And Savior, And Uses His Knowledge Of Coming Events To Defeat The Godless Hordes And Drive Them From Our Fair Republic was too much.

I can think of only one other time that a movie title has been changed after the fact– when George Lucas, the king of retroactive tampering, changed Raiders Of The Lost Ark to Indiana Jones And The Raiders Of The Lost Ark (so all the films would have Indiana Jones in the title).

Anyway, make sure you pre-order the film today, before Warner changes the title yet again!