A "title drop" is when the name of the movie is said in the movie's script. When it comes, it can seem momentous or awkward or, on a few occasions, even natural. You know that some movies don't have a permanent title when shooting begins. Sometimes a good line becomes the title instead of the other way around. But it often seems forced.
Dominikus Baur and Alice Thudt analyzed 73,921 movies going back to 1940 for title drops. Only about a third of them have a title drop in the actual movie dialogue, so that's 26,965 movies. They identified 277,668 title drops, which is an average of more than ten per movie! But... some movies are extreme outliers, like Barbie, which says the word "Barbie" 267 times. That makes up for many movie like The Fellowship of the Ring, which has those words exactly one time. Documentaries and biopics tend to have a lot of them, because they are often named for the subject. It's the same for fictional movies named after the main character.
But the deep dive into the data of title drops goes much deeper. What are the highest rated movies with title drops? Where do those drops occur? In which decade are title drops most common? What are the longest title drops? (Hint: it's 17 words long!) There's even a searchable database so you can look up your favorite movies and find out if and where it has a title drop. -via Metafilter
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