When space is at a premium

I was looking through my work notebook today and I saw some notes I scribbled while on the plane to Singapore last month, reminding me that I never actually wrote the post I intended to write from those notes.

So let's pretend it's still three weeks ago -- a much more innocent, simpler time -- and we'll go from there. 

When I was scrolling through the movies available on the plane, I noticed something funny. They didn't allocate enough space to fit in the full movie title for titles that were more than about four words long, which I get. It's some of the abbreviations themselves that I didn't get, since many of them were lacking the most important word, the word that really orients you and provides you the most relevant information about whether this is something you really want to watch -- namely, the franchise title.

And so it is that the following options appeared on the plane for my viewing pleasure:

The Chamber of Secrets
Let There Be Carnage
Here We Go Again!
The Meaning of Life
Order of the Phoenix
Prisoner of Azkaban
Return of the King
The Two Towers
The Half-Blood Prince

Of course, you know what franchises these movies are a part of, because you're a cinephile. But your average punter (to use the Australian term), who only watches movies when they're on a plane? Imagine their surprise when they click into the movie with the incredibly cool title Let There Be Carnage and find out that it's just another dumb superhero movie. 

If I'm this airline -- and it was nearly a month ago so I'm not even sure I remember which airline it was -- oh yeah it was JetStar -- I feel like I'm better off, on a limited word count, going with something like Harry Potter: The Chamber or Mamma Mia: Here We. The name of the franchise is actually what you really care about, not which of the many sequels it is. And if you then do care about which sequel it is, at least you have a couple unique words in the subtitle to help distinguish it from other sequels.

The funny thing about this was that they did not do this for the Spider-Man movies.

Each of the three Spider-Man movies available contained their full title, likely because each subtitle (No Way Home, Far From Home, Homecoming) contained just few enough additional characters to meet the space limitations. It seemed like an exception for this franchise, but it was more like a coincidence driven by the shorter and snappier Spider-Man titles. By contrast, titular brevity has not been the strong suit for the Harry Potter series.