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I'm with Frank on this. I've seen it many times over the years on film cans &
boxes, most recently with the 70mm prints of "Licorice Pizza" which were
shipped under the title "Soggy Bottom" (I'm guessing the 35mm prints too)
But have never seen it used for posters. I wonder if it's going to become
a common practice.
I've never seen a fake title on a movie poster tube. Film cans, all the time. Posters, never. (So far.)
It happened with the first of the Star Wars prequels. I forget the fake title that was used, but we got a poster tube with a title I didn't recognize, so I just set it aside. Several weeks later, I got curious about the title and took the poster out, and lo and behold it was the teaser for Episode I.
I don't remember seeing fake poster titles since then, but it's probably happened.
I can see why someone would want to produce a movie under a code title. George Lucas did so with "Blue Harvest" back in 1982 for "RotJ", because every time he mentioned Star Wars, he triggered a boatload of attention he couldn't use and prices for everything tended to go up in factors.
But, what's the deal with sending posters, trailers or even DCPs under code-names? Especially when you can just look-up the codename with a single query on the Internet?
Yeah, but there's a difference between a working title and silly code names.
Working titles are used because, as Marcel says, you want to keep quiet about your production until the time comes to publicize and release it. It's also because people sometimes don't know the final version of the title until the production nears completion. As legend has it, "Return of the Jedi" was planned to be called "REVENGE of the Jedi" until the title was changed, just before release.
Silly code names are little more than gossip fodder for the hipsters and the in-crowd who think they are special because of some kind of "open secret" that only "certain people" are supposed to know about.
What happens, twenty years from now, when somebody is searching through an archive listing, somewhere, trying to find a copy of a movie but they can't because of some stupid code name, the meaning of which was lost decades ago?
If I recall correctly, Revenge of the Jedi posters actually went out..
I can't remember the code name, but I remember sometime in the early 80's getting a 35mm print of Marlon Brando's The Wild One with a code name lab printed on the leaders. So unless they coded it for some sort of re-release (or a really late title change) code naming goes back until at least the 50s.
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