Nested Film Titles

The picture-in-picture feature.

Here’s a little variation on a piece I did before as Nested Book Titles…only with films!

This time my source material was simpler: just the film titles that I’d collected from Wikipedia—all 46,684 of them, at last count. (I cut a few junk entries and duplicates from the last time I used the list.) The completist approach had its pros and cons: I was a lot less worried about missing anything, but I was worried that maybe I was being too inclusive. After all, pretty much anyone with a phone and a YouTube account can be a filmmaker these days. Many of the movies on the list were unfamiliar to me, and as you may know from other posts here, I’m pretty into film trivia.

Should the results be limited to English-language titles? Maybe various “top 100” and “top 1000” lists? That was part of how I gathered the books…but I did pull from the Wikipedia bestseller list, so this method seemed to best parallel what I did before.

The most commonly found film in other film names is E, a title used in foreign-language films of 2006 and 2017. Here’s the top 20:

As you can see, it’s a lot simpler than the film list, which only had a few one-letter titles. I only recognize a few of these: O, a modern adaptation of Othello set in contemporary high school; M, a classic police-procedural that makes a lot of “greatest of all time” film lists; and Ma, a 2019 movie that turned Oscar-winning Octavia Spencer into a horror icon.

I thought I might’ve known W, but the simple one-letter title is for a foreign film; the satirical biopic of George W. Bush I was thinking of was titled W., with a period.

Most of the movies that I wasn’t familiar with turned out to be foreign films, but G is an interesting wrinkle. Despite having no connection to O, it is another adaptation of a classic story anchored in contemporary Black life—The Great Gatsby as reimagined against hip-hop’s invasion of the Hamptons. (There’s another film called G from a couple of years later, a documentary about drug use among the Navajo.)

The first three-letter movie I recognize on the list is Her, another pronoun title like those that dominated the book-titles study. (Naturally, horror films It and Us placed even higher.) The first four-letter film I recognize is Them. It’s not just that other films like to use pronouns, it’s that plus the fact that pronouns tend to be made of simple strings that show up in lots of other common words.

Breaking that trend, the five-letter champ was House, used for both an early J-horror film and an American horror movie with three sequels. Six letters was Murder. Louis Phillips shared some research with me that indicated “Murder” was the most popular single word in mystery fiction, so it’s interesting to see it pop up here.

The seven-letter top spot goes to Thunder with Lon Chaney, one of the last great silent films, followed by The Wild, an animated Madagascar rip-off. Beyond that, the eight-letter top pick, The World, arrives before the seven-letter ones do. The fictional characters who appear most often in movie titles appear to be Frankenstein, followed by Scooby-Doo. Sadly, Scooby-Doo! Frankencreepy does not count toward Frankenstein’s total.

Both Them and Murder are almost the names of famous American films…but you’d need an exclamation point on the end for those. Them! is a monster movie about giant ants, Murder! is an Alfred Hitchcock release. (Hitch would later add to the count for the exclamation-less Murder with Dial M for Murder).

With so many shorter titles, it’s easy to build “nesting dolls” like E/He/The/Them/The Mighty/The Mighty Ducks/D2: The Mighty Ducks 2 and E/He/The/Another/Die Another Day. The first, at seven movies, is probably the longest string I can engineer.

Longest film title put inside another film title? National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, dropped within National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2, the latter of which is sometimes subtitled Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure. Sequels naturally account for a lot of title-in-title action. The longest title inside another title that’s not part of the same franchise as the larger one—though they do share a common inspiration—is 1946’s Henry Fonda vehicle My Darling Clementine, one letter apart from O My Darling Clementine, released three years earlier.

The only three-letter movies not contained inside any other movies that most Americans have heard of are Weird Al Yankovic’s UHF…and 2022’s Tár, if you count the accented “á” as a different letter than its unaccented version. There’s one foreign film that, by similar rules, is uncontained and only two letters: Ön, a Swedish film about cultural liberation from the 1960s.

The shortest uncontained movie may be only one letter long…Darren Aronofsky’s noirish π. However, it only gets a “maybe,” because the letter π also shows up in the pseudoscientific What tнe #$*! Dө ωΣ (k)πow!? The latter movie is sometimes titled What the Bleep Do We Know?, as it is in my database, but π is sometimes titled as Pi, and in both cases, it’s a little hard to say which version of the title is “correct.” But if there’s one thing I learned from watching π (or Pi), it’s that it’s best not to think too hard about the things that’ll drive you crazy.