Warner Bros.’s newest CGI-laden fantasy film, Jack The Giant Slayer, opened last week, and while it led the earnings among weekend competitors, its box office haul was far from Gargantuan. The film had a $190 million budget. It saw a return of $27.2 million for the weekend. The Los Angeles Times called it the “first big-budget disaster of 2013.” And the New York Times called it a “fee, fi, fo, fizzle.”
Blame it on a lack of star power that didn’t extend far beyond Ewan McGregor or a premiere that came during the post-Oscar malaise. Consider the change in release date from June of 2012 to March of 2013, often the harbinger of a troubled project.
But one of the film’s most revealing, last-minute alterations passed by mostly unnoticed. Sometime around last October, the title was changed from Jack the Giant Killer to Jack the Giant Slayer. A rep from Warner Bros. tells Fast Company via email that the name change was intended to make the movie–which draws from a mixture of two fairy tales, “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Jack the Giant Killer”–more “family friendly.” In doing so, the studio seemed to assume the word “slayer” was more family friendly than “killer.”
Or more parent friendly.
“The nuances of the title change will be lost on children,” explains Laurel Sutton, principal at Catchword Brand Name Development, a naming company that creates names for various things from products to companies. “Kids will call it the ‘Jack and the Beanstalk movie’ or ‘the giant movie.’” A studio’s concern about family friendliness stems from the belief that the movie will appeal to a young audience that relies on its parents for ticket purchasing and chauffeuring. If a parent feels that a movie has an objectionable title, or that the title suggests objectionable content in the film, they’re not going to be as inclined to facilitate a viewing.
From that perspective, the name switch appears to have been prudent. “The word ‘slayer’ has definite associations with fairy tales and knights and dragons, and seems much more at home in the world of fantasy,” says Sutton. “‘Killer’ is far more realistic: There are killers in everyday life. We read about them in the paper. The word elicits a much more visceral response.”
Enter The Bad Word Bot
That emotional response to the word “killer” could be enough to scare away wary parents. But can we use numbers to predict how words will make us feel? That’s where Yejin Choi, an assistant professor of computer science at SUNY Stony Brook, comes in. She and a team of researchers put together an algorithm to teach machines how positive or negative a word is. Choi uses a set of words, or corpus, from Google, which includes sequences of words. Using those sequences, the research team put together an algorithm to build graphs, teaching machines how positive or negative words tend to be.
