Bad Teacher opened this week. I don't know if it's any good, but I do know what it's about: a bad teacher.
It's just the most recent case in a spate of bluntly named movies. The trend seemed to start with genre-mashup-parodies like Scary Movie and, more depressingly, Date Movie and Epic Movie. Their titles served to indicate their membership in the genre-mashup-parody genre, as well as suggesting some kind of archetypal status, maybe as a curative for their soul-crushing banality.
More recently the convention has spread to movies of all genres. Bad Teacher, Friends with Benefits, Prom, and Babies are just a few examples of successful recent movies with whack-you-over-the-head titles. I assume the convention has to do with selling the movies and more specifically an anxiety that people won't see a movie if they can't figure out exactly what it's about within four milliseconds. The idea that the unknown can be more alluring than the known has apparently been rejected.
Meanwhile the book industry has taken naming in a different direction, but with a similar motivation. Rather than the shotgun blast of ____ Movie, books have embraced catchy titles girded with pedantic subtitles that spell out exactly what the book is about. Like movies they banish any trace of mystery, they're just not into the whole brevity thing.
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