Anagram Double Features (1 of 2)

Hollywood recycles everything.

Although I might do more “nesting” lists in the future, I don’t want to get too repetitive with them. So I thought I’d shift my attention to a more traditional form of wordplay…and I stumbled over an Excel macro that allowed me to find anagrams in large lists.

Testing my list of all films, I found roughly 330-340 pairs that were anagrams of each other. A lot of these are not films well-known to an American audience, even a movie-loving one. But in this two-parter, I’ll show off eight pairs that are!

(I did also find a few “triplets”: sets of three movies that were all anagrams of each other, but none that were commonly known. And yes, I know how hipster that sounds. “It’s a triple-anagram-feature, dear, you wouldn’t have heard of it.”)

Honorable mention to Saw IV and Saw VI and 2001 and 2010; both pairs share a franchise but technically qualify. I could also get into stuff like Godzilla vs. Mothra and Mothra vs. Godzilla, which are two separate films released decades apart. But anagrams are more fun when they’re “well-mixed” and when there’s clearly no relationship between the two movies, so they don’t get the full poster treatment here!

One more thing—a few of these titles like Breakout above and Dead Cert below have more than one movie to their name. IMdB lists no fewer than four movies named Breakout. But the one being released this year looks fun, so I opted to give it some attention. And I have a certain fondness for Dick Francis mysteries, so I opted for that Dead Cert over the 2010 vampire film.

Concluded tomorrow!