Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis' 1985 time-travel fantasy starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, offers two title drops: lines of dialog that contain the name of the movie. Dominikus Baur and Alice Thudt created a website that collects all such examples of cinematic self-reference. Their large-scale analysis plowed through 73,921 movies released in the last 80 years.
The overall meta-ness of this is – of course – nothing new. And filmmakers and scriptwriters have been doing it since the dawn of the medium itself*. It's known in film speak as a title drop. Consequently, there's tons of examples throughout movie history that range from the iconic (see Back to the Future's above)
via the eccentric, the very much self-aware, to the downright cringe.
There were some surprising challenges in the data: it's by no means a simple matter of downloading subtitles and setting loose a perl script. Among the stats gathered: 36.5% of movies have at least one title drop during their runtime. Movies named for central characters (Barbie, Sita) have title drops in unremarkable abundance, but others are careful to restrict it to a single, telling utterance (Amadeus, The Princess Bride, Patton)
Honestly, some of them are amazing and I don't want to spoil Dominikus and Alice's outstanding web presentation by quoting them here.
Previously:
• The most common words in movie titles
• Adding '-ing' to movie titles makes them way better
• Opening titles of B-movies
