There is a lot going on in Baby Driver, a caffeinated splicing of crime
thriller and jukebox musical. Once you clunk-click into the central
conceit – audacious heists, hard-boiled badinage and breakneck car
chases all wittily synced and choreographed to its central character's
eclectic iPod playlist – it is an intoxicating, heightened huff of pure
cinema. But if you don't read advance reviews (especially ones heavy on
terms like "diegetic music"), your first exposure to writer-director
Edgar Wright's latest movie will probably be its title.

Baby
Driver ... is it an impressively rushed sequel to Alec Baldwin's
animated semi-hit The Boss Baby from two months back? Baby Driver – even
if it does make perfect sense in context (Ansel Elgort, as gifted
wheelman Baby, operates in a world of pulpy code names like Doc, Darling
and Bats) – it still sounds more like a slapstick childcare-gone-wrong
comedy, right? Baby Driver, Baby Driver, Baby Driver: maybe repeating it
will help burn a new association into the collective consciousness, the
way everyone overlooks the fact that Oasis is an awful band name or
like that brief period we all got used to saying "Courteney
Cox-Arquette".

Baby Driver is a timely reminder that the title of
a film might not make it a hit, but a well-chosen one can certainly
help. If you're aiming for arthouse success, by all means, go long and
poetic. Bring on your Wind That Shakes the Barleys, your Uncle Boonmee
Who Can Recall His Past Lives, your Me and Earl and the Dying Girls.
They might sound like capsule reviews, but To Wong Foo, Thanks For
Everything, Julie Newmar and The Assassination of Jesse James by the
Coward Robert Ford have their champions, even if none set the box office
aflame.

In the course of his six Tolkien adaptations, Peter
Jackson seemed to be on a one-man mission to prove that a cumbersome
film title need not be a barrier to enormous commercial success, and
word-heavy instalments do not seem to have hurt the Harry Potter
cinematic universe. But slapping together a title card that resembles a
late-game Scrabble board is no guarantee that your franchise will go the
distance (just ask Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole or
Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief).

As in
life, perhaps the trick is to stand out but not in such a way that
people avert their eyes and hurry past. Look at The Chumscrubber: who
would even be tempted to give that a Netflix test drive? Rancid
Aluminium – another contender for most off-putting film title ever – at
least has the excuse of being taken directly from its source. Such
literary adaptations often find themselves hobbled in the name game,
required to weigh up the benefits of locking in fans of the book at the
risk of confusing everyone else. For every breakout like Ang Lee's
luminous Life of Pi, there are costly casualties like Salmon Fishing in
the Yemen, A Hologram for a King, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and even
Lee stumbled with Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

Action movies
are tough, and not just because Steven Seagal seems to have put
practically every vaguely exciting three-word statement (Today You Die,
Flight of Fury, Driven to Kill) on straight-to-DVD lockdown. Too generic
and you risk underselling your movie: the recent Criminal, starring
Kevin Costner, is by no means a great film but that title totally buries
its weird mind-swap premise. Too evocative and you risk alienating the
action hardcore: From Paris With Love was a rare misstep from the Luc
Besson production line, a daft Euro shoot-em-up that would likely have
made more money if it had simply gone the Ronseal route and arrived in
cinemas as "Bald Travolta With a Rocket Launcher".

Putting aside
John Wick – a movie clearly on a mission to make its eponymous hero
mythic – deploying a fictional character name as your title feels like
asking a lot of your audience. Michael Clayton did reasonably well, even
generating Oscar heat, but feels like an outlier on a cinematic call
sheet of duffers that would include Charlotte Gray, Larry Crowne,
Charlie Bartlett and Mary Reilly. Not even Kate Winslet and Kevin Spacey
could drum up any interest in The Life of David Gale, whoever he is.

In
gauging the effectiveness of generic titles, a recent case study has
unfolded practically in real time. While well-made and relatively
well-reviewed, Tom Cruise's 2014 sci-fi resurrection shuffle Edge of
Tomorrow was considered to have underperformed at the global box office
after making only $370m (from a budget of $180m). When it was time for
home release, the terse tagline mantra – Live Die Repeat – was given
equal billing, suggesting that the Seagal-esque blandness of Edge of
Tomorrow had been deemed no longer fit for purpose.

Of course,
you can opt to tailor your title to specific markets to try and achieve
maximum traction. Disappointingly, distributors seem to think that the
UK currently has no interest in embracing ambiguity. One of 2017's
biggest hits was released in the US as The Fate of the Furious, rather
sweetly smuggling the necessary marker that we've somehow reached the
eighth instalment of Vin Diesel's haywire hotrod franchise into "fate".
It's admittedly a pun, but a pun that reaches for poetry. In Brexit
Britain? It came out as boring old Fast & Furious 8. No art. No
finesse. No melody. (Still, it made a ton of money.) So at least Baby
Driver is staying true to its artistic vision. You do you, Baby. You do
you.