A film’s title stands as the first threshold through which audiences decide whether to embrace or reject it. While Arabs traditionally believe that “the book’s cover reveals its content,” Western culture resists this notion, encouraging people instead to “never judge a book by its cover.” The assumption is that neither the cover nor the title necessarily reflects the essence of the work, even when the film itself is adapted from a book.
Between these two perspectives lies room to appreciate the Arab viewpoint: trusting the first impression offered by a title, guided by the traditional saying, “The eve of Eid is known from its afternoon.” The expression refers to how the preparations preceding Eid — the decorations, shopping, and growing anticipation — already announce the celebration to come. Appearance, in this sense, reveals content. The Western mindset, by contrast, favors experimentation and the suspension of judgment until after the experience itself. Yet, as Arabs, we often lean toward the former perspective. The matter carries genuine weight for us, particularly when experience later confirms our instincts.
The choice of a title occupies a crucial place in a film’s life cycle: from the screenwriter who first conceives it, to the director who shapes it, and finally to the producer who releases it to audiences. Box-office success can depend heavily on this single decision, as an attractive title may eclipse every other element surrounding the work. In this sense, filmmakers place a considerable part of their project’s fate in the audience’s reception of its name.
There is no doubt that titles matter profoundly. This concern is not shaped by proverbs alone; Western criticism also grants the title significant importance, perhaps even more rigorously. Entire studies have been devoted to the title as a “threshold,” and the name of Gérard Genette inevitably emerges in this discussion. His contributions to narrative theory extend naturally into the adjacent world of cinema and film analysis.
The recent experience of Christopher Nolan’s (Oppenheimer, 2023) provides a compelling example. The title itself generated immense curiosity among audiences eager to discover the story behind the figure at its center. In doing so, it fulfilled the four functions of the title identified by Genette: allure, suggestion, description, and designation. Oppenheimer condenses its meaning into a single name, unlike the far longer title of the original source material, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, from which the film was adapted.
Audiences approached the film eager to witness how Nolan would present the story of the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”: his role in developing the world’s first atomic weapon and its consequences during World War II. Once the initial attraction of the title gave way to the nearly three-hour cinematic experience, audiences were left to either embrace or reject Nolan’s interpretation. Some viewed the film as a powerful artistic achievement that presented history through a compelling dramatic lens, while others regarded it as a sophisticated act of historical distortion that softened the magnitude of the crimes involved. Titles, then, function as bait offered to audiences, while the cinema itself becomes the space that completes the experience and allows viewers to emerge afterward reflecting on the journey they have undergone.
The film achieved remarkable success upon release and continues to do so, and part of that success can undoubtedly be attributed to the effectiveness of its title. For this reason, filmmakers sometimes alter titles throughout the production process until they arrive at the final version presented to audiences. In some cases, titles are even changed after release when they fail to generate the expected attraction. There is no harm in replacing one flavor with another if the original fails to capture attention.
In the 1960s, Richard Williams developed a project titled (The Thief and the Cobbler), inspired by One Thousand and One Nights — a literary world that has inspired countless artists, although we ourselves have yet to fully realize its creative potential. Across more than three decades, Williams’ project moved repeatedly between acceptance and rejection because of its technical complexity and financial difficulties.
Eventually, the story reached audiences in fragmented forms: first through Aladdin, produced by Walt Disney in 1992, and later through The Princess and the Cobbler in 1993, after the original project had been purchased, re-edited, and reconstructed by Miramax. The film later appeared under the title (Arabian Knight) in 1995 before finally returning to its original title, The Thief and the Cobbler, during its 1997 home video release.
Such journeys demonstrate the immense importance of titles and the consequences of choosing one title over another. They also explain the distortions — or what some might call betrayals — that often occur when film titles are translated into Arabic. Translators and distributors frequently adopt entirely different titles based on what they believe Arab audiences will more readily accept, or out of fear that the original title may provoke rejection. At times, these decisions are also driven by aesthetic considerations within language itself.
This can be seen in the Arabic translation of the 2020 film (There Is No Evil) by Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof. The original title translates literally into Arabic as “There Is No Devil” (لا وجود للشيطان), yet the Arabic title became “Absolute Goodness” (خير مطلق), removing any direct mention of the devil and instead emphasizing the idea of attaining absolute goodness through his absence.
A similar transformation appears in the English translation of the Tunisian film (Bik Eneich) «بيك نعيش», directed by Mehdi Barsaoui. The Arabic phrase roughly means “We Live Through You,” carrying emotional and poetic resonance within Tunisian colloquial speech. Yet the film was released internationally under the far more direct title A Son, a choice that foregrounds the narrative itself while sacrificing much of the original expression’s linguistic beauty and emotional subtlety.
Ultimately, the process of titling deserves far greater appreciation than it is usually granted. What appears simple on the surface is, in reality, exceptionally difficult. The consequences of a title can be enormous, and the effort invested in finding the right one should not be underestimated. A film resembles a newborn child, while its creators endure the exhausting process of searching for a suitable name. There always remains the lingering fear that the title may ultimately fail to earn approval — echoing the sentiment expressed in a song by Fairuz: “Names are merely words” (الأسامي كلام), “What do words matter?” (شو خص الكلام), while “Our eyes are our true names” (عينينا هنّي أسامينا).