Alliterative Movies

Fine, fun films!

So, how many movies have alliterative titles?

More than I can count easily!

IMDb has a few alliteration tags and Letterboxd has some volunteer-curated lists of alliterative movies (this one is extensive but misses recent additions like La La Land and Blue Beetle). But all the lists have glaring omissions and some have questionable inclusions. (Wonka was on one list, even though it’s a one-word title, presumably because “Willy Wonka” is the title character’s full name.)

And how strict do you want to be when you talk about an “alliterative title”? Should we allow any title with two words that begin with the same letter, e.g., Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? What about the horror film Talk to Me?

Different strokes for different folks. For me, the most interesting alliterations are “pure” ones, in which the movie title (1) is at least two words long and (2) contains only words that begin with the same letter. I’d also exclude movies where the titles just duplicate the same word, like Liar Liar. Those seem like their own thing.

The best-known “pure” alliterations I can find from sifting through the lists are as follows:

Gone Girl, Donnie Darko, Batman Begins, Pitch Perfect, Dirty Dancing, Blue Beetle, Freaky Friday, Fantastic Four, Fast Five, Brother Bear, Beautiful Boy, Peter Pan, Mad Max, Mafia Mamma, Wayne’s World, Revolutionary Road, Bad Boys, Magic Mike, Ella Enchanted, King Kong, Due Date, Coach Carter, and Funny Face. Naturally, either version of Freaky Friday and King Kong qualifies.

If we loosen things up enough to ignore “stop words” like the to in Talk to Me, we can get a second list:

Guardians of the Galaxy, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, The Sixth Sense, Memories of Murder, V for Vendetta, The Seven Samurai, Beauty and the Beast, The Seventh Seal, North by Northwest, The Karate Kid, Dumb and Dumber, Dancer in the Dark, The Blues Brothers, Dawn of the Dead, and Mary and Max.

Cutting it off here means excluding some movies I fondly remember, including The Muppet Movie, The Dirty Dozen, Julie and Julia, War of the Worlds, and The Sword in the Stone. You could put Mamma Mia! in either list, depending on whether you used its shorter title or Mamma Mia! The Movie.

What about simple alliteration threefers? Here I find La La Land, What Women Want, Wild Wild West, Bye Bye Birdie, Beach Blanket Bingo, F for Fake, and Flesh for Frankenstein. Note how often repetition or a stop word becomes part of these titles! Stop-word-skipping examples include House on Haunted Hill and Sweet Smell of Success.

Strings of four or more, with or without additional stop words, seem pretty rare. The only one I could find offhand was Martha Marcy May Marlene, a small film that was Elizabeth Olsen’s first major role.

Any official list would also have to decide what kind of alliteration it’s using. Is it “eye” alliteration, as in Eagle Eye, where two words always start with the same letter but not always the same sound? Or “ear” alliteration, as in Horton Hears a Who!?

Whatever method you use, alliterative titles seem genre-agnostic. You find them in comedies, dramas, thrillers, horror, and animated and superhero features…not too often in Westerns, but in most other places. They’re in high-minded literary adaptations like Sense and Sensibility and broad, “dumb” entertainment like…Dumb and Dumberer. Overall, they don’t represent too many blockbuster hits. But when a mid-range movie is looking to stick in a potential viewer’s mind, alliteration can help give its title a little lilt.