Waiting for the Title Character

We like a movie named after a character. I’ve been going through lists of them online, and I found two different lists of them that have significant but not total overlap, and one of ninety that has even more movies not on either of the other lists. Usually, of course, it’s the main character. I could put together a list of at least a hundred movies without leaving the realm of Disney, and that’s even before you get into Pixar, Marvel, and so forth. Probably two hundred. All theatrical release.

What most of those movies have in common is that they’re named after the main character. You go to see a movie called Cinderella, you know you’re going to see Cinderella. That’s how this works. And then you get Coco. It’s Pixar, so it wouldn’t go on that list, but it is still named after a character who hardly gets any lines and is mostly seen as an old woman, probably with dementia, who kind of sits alone in a room a lot of the time. She’s the driving force of the plot, though that’s not revealed for a while, but the movie could be named Miguel or Hector or Mama Imelda and be about a character with more screen time.

It isn’t just Disney, of course. The movie Oscar is one I love a great deal. It’s a farce starring Sylvester Stallone and worth seeking out. Oscar is the chauffeur. At the beginning of the movie, he has left and one of the other characters is forced to drive the car. We then find out that he’s been dating Stallone’s character’s daughter, and her claim to be pregnant with his child so she can get out of the house drives much of the plot. He doesn’t show up until literally the last minute of the film, at which point she’s marrying someone else. (I won’t give away who or how or anything else, because seriously, go find and watch Oscar.) Kirk Douglas gets more screentime than the title character, and he dies before the opening credits.

In the cases of both Coco and Oscar, the characters drive the plot. Everything Hector has done since before Miguel’s grandmother was born has been driven by Coco. (Arguably before his great-grandmother was born, if he was the kind of person who was thinking about his kid while his wife was pregnant.) The family’s hatred of musicians stems from how Coco’s father treated her, or anyway how they thought he did. Meanwhile Oscar has likely convinced Lisa that the only way she’s going to have a life she enjoys is to get out, because her father’s idea of a good husband and hers are so different.

Sometimes, the character is such a force that you forget that they aren’t the lead. Beetlejuice is of course a prime example of this. The lead characters are the Maitlands, that couple who were bougie before bougie was a thing people said. Eddie Valiant is the main character of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Roger gets far less screentime than you might remember. Which honestly is a good thing, because a full movie of Roger would be kind of insufferable. Dr. Strangelove takes a while to show up in Dr. Strangelove.

Who you name a movie after tells you a lot about the movie, and of course the best example of this is [Person’s Name Here] and the Chocolate Factory. The original book, and the Burton movie, are named after Charlie, because Charlie is supposed to be the character we follow. The ‘70s version decides, admittedly not incorrectly, that Willie Wonka is the interesting character and changes the movie’s name accordingly. Never mind that, for obvious reasons, it takes us a bit to get to Willie Wonka and that even when he shows up, we’re still following Charlie.

The ultimate, of course, is movies named after people never appearing in it all. Waiting for Guffman, of course, is a play on Waiting for Godot. Rebecca de Winter is dead before Rebecca begins; that’s the whole point. Apparently Kangaroo Jack is named after some guy the main characters knew who the kangaroo reminds them of, but to be sure of that I’d have to watch Kangaroo Jack and that’s not happening. And, of course, there’s Harvey, who is in theory there pretty much the whole time but you never do see him.