A disaster of a name
sinister Hollywood producers could have imagined. His brinkmanship approach to diplomacy and his cavalier sensibility towards climate change make the plot of Geostorm sound like a David Attenborough doco.
Maybe Geostorm is facing the wall because of the name — it’s just not very exciting.
In Hollywood the title is everything. The first thing you see on the poster, the first thing you punch into the Google.
You need a better name than Geostorm if you’re going to drag a hundred million back into the bottom line. Names are everything. They can be simple, literal, obvious ... but they have to be intriguing.
Consider Terminator, Alien, Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom.
None of these are mind blowing, but none are pedestrian.
Geostorm just isn’t up there with Good Will Hunting or Dead Poets Society.
It doesn’t have the punch of Pale Rider or the grit of Straight Outta Compton or the intrigue of Unforgiven or The Wolf of Wall Street or The Shawshank Redemption.
Great movie titles tell the ticket buying public what to expect but they also provide us with a question: “What’s all that about?” Nobody demanded that Bach come up with a catchy phrase that was going to hook his audience in for a thrill ride.
Brandenberg Concerto is pretty literal. Almost lame. But that was a different time, pre-Trump, pre“Greed is good”.
But if Bach was getting a hundred million to create the concerto in the first place, maybe the producers would have designed a scintillating name to brand it?
Something like Gone With the Wind.
The movie business is a business. People do judge the book by the cover. In this day of streaming and Netflix and The Handmaids Tale and Harry Potter you need an outstanding handle if you want to sell a $100 million worth of tickets. Ross Mueller is a freelance writer and director