Artifact Title / Live-Action Films

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• The Apple Dumpling Gang was the name of a group of orphan children who found a fortune in California gold. The sequel, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, had none of the children in it, and instead starred the two bumbling bandits (played by Tim Conway and Don Knotts) who acted as comedy relief in the film.
• The French film Babysitting by Philippe Lacheau (who went on to make City Hunter: The Cupid's Perfume) had a sequel titled Babysitting 2 that had nothing to do with babysitting, being simply a different story with the same characters as the first film. The actual common them of the two movies is the Found Footage Films plot.
• B-movie action/martial arts movie series Best of the Best. The first one involves crowning a champion of a martial arts tournament, hence the title. The sequel is a revenge blood-sport style movie, but the title can sort of still be justified. The third and fourth movies have nothing whatsoever to do with martial arts competition: The third movie involves white supremacists trying to take over a small town, and the fourth one involved the Russian Mafia and counterfeit cash.
• The Big Sleep lacks the narration of the book, so there is no Title Drop to connect the plot with the title.
• Blastfighter was originally planned to be a sci-fi film: Mad Max in the woods. By the time it was changed to Die Hard in the woods, promotional material using the title Blastfighter had already been distributed, so the producers stuck with the title despite it having little to do with the new plot.
• The title of Blood and Chocolate (1997) ends up being this for the film adaptation, due to removal of the line referencing it and the substantial changes made to the plot and Vivian's relationship dynamic with Gabriel and Aiden. The book ends with Vivian choosing Gabriel, stating that Aiden's kisses are sweet but fleeting like chocolate, whereas Gabriel's kisses are full of life and passion like blood. This doesn't happen in the film; although it has Vivian working at a chocolate-making shop, it's so irrelevant to the plot and her character that the title comes off as nonsensical to anyone not familiar with the book.
• The Bourne Series started off fairly clear with The Bourne Identity being about Jason Bourne trying to understand what he is; the two sequels The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum don't really make sense given the stories, but are a part of the book titles and thus they were kept. Some feel that had the titles been reversed for the second and third movies, they might have made more sense. The second film was Bourne telling the government to leave him alone (giving his "ultimatum"), and the third film was Bourne destroying the government conspiracy surrounding Treadstone (showing his "supremacy" over the government officials involved with it). The Bourne Legacy stretches this even further, starring a new character not named Bourne (the "legacy" is the aftereffects of Bourne blowing up Treadstone).
• In Bruce Almighty, the main character gets God's powers, but this does not happen to the main character in the sequel, Evan Almighty. So technically, Evan is not almighty. Really, Evan's Ark would have been a better, more apt title, but then it would have been harder to tell it was supposed to be a sequel.
• The Carry On series began with Carry On, Sergeant, a command familiar to all ex-servicemen or national servicemen at the time. It was commonly used by British officers, indicating that the sergeant addressed should proceed with orders given, or resume what they were doing before they were interrupted. Only a few of the subsequent titles came close to following that context.
• Die Hard in Poland and Italy has this. The title there is Glass Trap (Szklana Pułapka and Trappola di cristallo, respectively), which makes sense, since the first one takes place in a skyscraper. Not so much in the sequels. The same happens in Spain. The title there is Crystal Jungle (Jungla de Cristal). Latin-America was relieved of the problem, as the movie there was called Duro de matar (Hard to kill). Russian version brilliantly replaced an idiom with an idiom, being called Крепкий орешек (A hard nut to crack), but the sequels had to go by numbers because of that.
• The Eddie Murphy Dr. Dolittle movies had three straight-to-video sequels after the two theatrical films. They carry the "Dr. Dolittle" title even though John himself doesn't appear and the main character is his youngest daughter Maya. While she inherited her father's ability to talk to animals, she's still a teenager and not an actual doctor. It's not until the end of the fifth movie that she finally starts college, but we never see her earn her veterinary degree and become Dr. Dolittle in her own right.
• The Fantastic Beasts saga is increasingly becoming this. Even if the titular fantastic beasts are still present in the films, they're no longer the main focus of the plot as they were in the first one.
• In Father of the Bride Part II, George's daughter who got married in the first film is no longer a bride. (The original 1950s films averted this by calling the sequel Father's Little Dividend.)
• There have thus far been five Final Destination movies, implying that the destination was never quite as final as they let on. (The fourth film in the franchise was even titled The Final Destination, but proved not to be; the next one resumed the naming convention as Final Destination 5)
• The first Free Willy movie ends with Willy being set free, hence the title. There isn't a whole lot of freeing in the sequels. Unless the "free" there is supposed to be an adjective describing Willy. This was originally supposed to be averted, as the second film was going to be titled Willy 2: The Adventure Home (early trailers carry this title). It seems as if Warner Bros. got cold feet and became afraid that people wouldn't make the connection to Free Willy.
• Only about half the Friday the 13th films are actually set on Friday the 13th. In particular, since the first three sequels take place over about a week, only one of those could be set on the 13th. There's also Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, a title that did not age well at all considering a sequel was released less than a year afterwards, and it's only the fourth in a twelve-film series now. Likewise, while Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday was the final film for nearly a decade, the release of subsequent films made that outdated.
• The third and final The Hangover movie veers from the What Did I Do Last Night? formula of the previous two. Which may be why the promotional material for the third film called it the Wolfpack Trilogy, rather than The Hangover Trilogy.
• In Poland, The Hangover was re-titled Kac Vegas (The Vegas Hangover and a wordplay on Las Vegas). When the second part did not happen in Las Vegas anymore, the distributors decided to title it Kac Vegas w Bangkoku (The Vegas Hangover In Bangkok). Everybody laughed.
• The film adaptation of Stephen King's short story collection Hearts in Atlantis is a fairly close adaption of the story "Low Men in Yellow Coats" (which takes up the bulk of the book), but it has nothing to do with the eponymous short story "Hearts in Atlantis". "Low Men in Yellow Coats" is about a boy who befriends a Cool Old Guy with psychic powers and tries to protect him from the mysterious men pursuing him, and "Hearts in Atlantis" is about a bunch of college kids who waste all their time playing Hearts (the card game) in their dorm room (which they call "Atlantis"), thus making the movie's title a bit baffling.
• The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia, as in the state, not a character. The entire film takes place there. Apparently the original title was The Haunting in Georgia before the suits decided the brand was more important.
• Home Alone: The first film fits this title perfectly. In the second film, Kevin isn't even at home, but he is alone. In the third film, Alex is at home, but isn't alone all that much as his mother is often at home as well. In the fourth film, Kevin is neither at home nor alone; he's at his future stepmother's house, which is always also occupied by the butler.
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: The titular Hunger Games ended after Catching Fire. This wasn't the case with the original novel, which was just called Mockingjay.
• The title of The Inhabited Island is explained in the book (the protagonist, Maksim, thinks of the planet on which he crash landed, as an "uninhabited island", and of himself as a "Robinson"), but not in the movie, making the title pointless.
• When Neil Diamond did his remake of The Jazz Singer, he retained the original title, although he sings no jazz in the movie.
• Jurassic Park: The park only merits a mention or two outside the first film. The Jurassic Park was pushed to the back of the title for The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Once there was again a dinosaur park, instead it was called Jurassic World (on the same island of Jurassic Park, with the same T. rex, and even featuring the ruins of the visitors center). The second title ended up staying relevant though, just in a different sense after the dinosaurs were released onto the mainland.
• The Karate Kid (2010) remake does not feature any karate, and when the primary character's mother talks about him learning Karate he explicitly states that it is Kung Fu, not Karate. Press releases have explained that the other characters gave him the derogatory nickname 'karate kid' because he claimed to know a little bit of karate early in the film, but he was never addressed as such in the movie itself. The film was released as The Kung-Fu Kid in several countries. In Japan & South Korea, it was called The Best Kid.
• Kingsman: The Golden Circle isn't really about the Kingsman, given the whole organization minus two members are destroyed in the first 15 minutes.
• The Kissing Booth 3: The title of The Kissing Booth series became less relevant with each instalment after the first one, though it's even less relevant in the third film than the second film, where the kissing booth at least has some significance to the story (it results in Lee and Rachel making up, Elle definitively rejecting Marco for Noah, and Ollie finally confessing his feelings for Miles). Here, the kissing booth has nothing to do with the plot and merely gets a cameo appearance.
• The Thin Man: The original film's title referred to the story's murder victim, referenced in dialogue as a "thin man with white hair". However, the sequels continued to use 'Thin Man' in the title, and the marketing department transferred the nickname to the lead character of Nick Charles. (The poster for the second film, After The Thin Man, is headlined "Mr. & Mrs Thin Man are back in their new hit!") Though the actual titles of the second and third films (After The Thin Man and Another Thin Man) could be interpreted to refer to a character other than Nick Charles, by the time of the fourth film (Shadow of The Thin Man) it's pretty clear they've given up even trying to pretend — The Thin Man is Nick Charles. In the fifth film in the series, The Thin Man Goes Home, it becomes explicit, as the plot has Nick and Nora go back to Nick's hometown.
• Troll 2 is about goblins. It has nothing to do with a troll or the original Troll. When asked, the director said, essentially, that trolls and goblins were the same thing.
• Both movies known as Troll 3 have nothing to do with trolls. One is about radioactive plants (originally titled The Creepers), and the other is a Conan-inspired film also known as Quest for the Mighty Sword.
• Major League: Back to the Minors. Oh, there are major league ballplayers in the movie — the Minnesota Twins are the Opposing Sports Team, playing their own AAA affiliate in an exhibition match.
• The remake of The Manchurian Candidate doesn't have anything to do with Manchuria. The writers justify the name by involving a corporation called "Manchurian Global" in the plot.
• Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials:
  • The film doesn't feature any maze running, since the maze had been solved in the last film. This wasn't the case with the original novel, which was just called The Scorch Trials.
  • Due to the film's plot being radically different from the book, The Scorch Trials part becomes this. In the book after Janson revealed to the Gladers that they were still under WICKED's control, the Gladers were made to cross the Scorch as part of a second trial — their first trial being the Maze from the previous book. In the film the Gladers themselves discover that they're still with WCKD and escape from them by crossing the scorch, meaning that they are not on any trial.
• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor did not feature the title character Imhotep ("the" Mummy). The villain was a mummy, but the movie might have been better titled "The Adventures of Rick O'Connell".
• My Girl had this problem in foreign markets: In Brazil, it was translated as Meu Primeiro Amor, meaning "My First Love, in Portuguese. It made sense for the first film... but not for the sequel. In Latin America, the movie was called Mi Primer Beso ("My First Kiss"), referencing the kiss between Vada and Thomas; in the sequel (called Mi Primer Beso 2''), Vada shares a kiss with Nick but that's obviously not the first for her anymore.
• The reason the book is titled The Neverending Story is left out of the film version. In the book, many vague allusions are made to the further adventures of secondary characters, always accompanied by the phrase, "But that is another story, and will be told another time." In the end, Bastian is told he can't leave until every storyline he started up is finished. However, several story hooks get created for every plot he wrapped up. Atreyu saves him by taking on the task on his behalf. In other words, the book has a very good reason why the story is neverending: because the act of writing a story creates a world where further adventures could happen, and telling those stories only creates openings for new ones. The human imagination has a limitless capacity for new stories.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street eventually left Elm Street. Though Freddy alludes to the spirit of the title in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare when he says that every town has an Elm Street. Relatedly, the latter film can no longer be called final since subsequent films were released.
• North By Northwest is a partial artifact title. On one level, it makes sense since it refers to Hamlet feigning madness as Cary Grant does. But on another level, the original draft of the script had set the ending in Alaska. The title only sort of made sense as a compass direction for the film's action in the original draft, but even less so when it was changed to Mount Rushmore.
• The eponymous diamond in The Pink Panther is only referred to in a few films of the series, leading many people to think that "the Pink Panther" is Inspector Clouseau's nickname. Averted by the second film in the series, however, A Shot in the Dark, named such because it includes Clouseau but not the diamond.
• Only the first Poison Ivy film actually has a protagonist named "Ivy". The other three do have protagonists with plant-themed names but that's about the only thing they have in common with the original.
• Pirates of the Caribbean zigzags this. Is still about pirates in the Caribbean but the sequels have very little connection with the ride it was based on besides a few Mythology Gags in comparison to The Curse of The Black Pearl being as close as an adaptation to the ride as it can be.
• Neither the title character nor his bar appear in Porky's II: The Next Day (Porky came back for the next one, though).
• Zig-zagged by the Police Academy movies. The first took place at the title's academy. The second only had a brief scene there. The third and fourth took place there. The fifth and all subsequent films had brief scenes at the academy at best. The series tried to make the title relevant with subtitles like "Their First Assignment" and "Back in Training," but ultimately gave up as later installments took the action to Miami Beach and Moscow.
• The Raid 2: Berandal is not about another raid, but about the first film's main character Rama infiltrating a criminal organization. The original screenplay titled Berandal (meaning Thug in Indonesian) started production right after director Gareth Evans finished his debut film Merantau, but the project was put on hold due to lack of proper funding. Evans instead went on to make the more low-budgeted The Raid Redemption, which was a great success internationally. Berandal was changed to serve as a sequel to The Raid, allowing Evans to produce the film with a proper budget.
• Rambo franchise: First Blood refers to how John Rambo justified maiming several American policemen: "They drew first blood, not me." In the second movie, Rambo: First Blood Part II, the cops are completely out of the picture, and there's no mention by anyone of who struck the first blow. Further movies dropped "First Blood" from the title (Rambo III and Rambo IV).
• Rush Hour. There's only one scene in the first movie where the title makes sense. As for the sequels, what does "rush hour" have to do with the crimes around the world?
• Space Jam: A New Legacy: The title "Space Jam" is very much an artifact of the 90s, when "jam" was a term for a slam dunk. Also, unlike the original movie, where the antagonists were aliens, this film doesn't involve outer space at all. Although it does involve cyberspace.
• In the original The Spy Who Loved Me novel, the book is written from the perspective of a new character, Vivienne Michel, who has an encounter with James Bond in the third act. That's no longer the case in the film, which is an In Name Only adaptation that tells a far more typical James Bond story from a third person perspective.
• Star Trek: The Motion Picture is no longer the only Star Trek motion picture. As of 2021, there are 13 movies and counting.
• In some sense (or from a certain point of view) it was inverted in Star Wars, which was the title under which the first movie was released, before any sequel or prequel existed. Later the title for that movie was retconned to "Episode IV: A New Hope", which frankly, wouldn't make much sense for the stand-alone film. The title is fine for the whole series, which features such interstellar conflicts the Clone Wars, the Galactic Civil War, and in both the novel timeline and The Force Awakens the second Galactic Civil War. There are also countless other wars in the spinoff novels.
• Taken 3 doesn't use abduction as a plot device.
• In the Terminator series, Skynet got its name because it was originally an automated global network of armed satellites built by the military; since the original film was made in 1984, this idea was likely inspired by the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative. The name stuck around for several sequels, even after Skynet got a more modern reimagining as a global computer network (reflecting the advent of the internet). The later films eventually addressed this, featuring later incarnations of Skynet renamed "Genisys" and "Legion".
• The Three Stooges were originally the supporting act for a comedian named Ted Healey and were called "Ted Healey and His Stooges". This made sense because a "stooge" is an insulting term for somebody who serves under somebody else and can also mean being the butt of a comedian's gags. But early in their film career, the Stooges broke up from Healey and became known as The Three Stooges, even though they were no longer stooges to anybody. Averted in the Spanish versions, where they are known as "Los Tres Chiflados" (The Three Crazy Men), and are never referred to as stooges to anyone.
• The TOPGUN part of Top Gun: Maverick. Even though the school's mentioned in dialogue, Maverick's trainees are all TOPGUN graduates, not current students, and they're established to be training in San Diego, roughly 450 miles from NAS Fallon where TOPGUN has been since 1996.
• The novel from which Trainspotting was adapted was named after a single incident within the story, in which the drugged-out characters encounter a trainspotter. This episode did not feature in the first film, but the scene appears in the second film to finally explain the title.
• The film TRON was named after the eponymous security program. Then along came TRON: Legacy, and Tron isn't anywhere to be found. Averted, however, when it turns out that Tron had been repurposed by Clu, and now goes by a different name... Rinzler.
• An interesting cross-language translation example happened with the Steven Seagal movie Under Siege. In Israel, the copywriters decided to translate the title as "Naval Siege", which sounded cooler in Hebrew. It also fit the movie well, because it takes place on a ship. However, when the sequel Under Siege 2: Dark Territory came out, they had a problem: the movie doesn't have a single ship in it. The result? The first movie is called "Naval Siege", while the second movie is called "Under Siege". Let the confusion commence!
• The title of X-Men Origins: Wolverine seems a bit ridiculous now, since the planned X-Men Origins series (of which it was meant to be the first installment) never actually came to be. The next film was supposed to be X-Men Origins: Magneto, but it turned into X-Men: First Class and the "Origins" idea was dropped in favor of a franchise reboot.