Has One Shot blown it by changing its name to Jack Reacher?

The producers of the Lee Childs adaptation, starring Tom Cruise, forgot one rule. Films named after characters usually perform anonymously at the box office
Misfire … Tom Cruise, star of Jack Reacher (formerly known as One Shot).
Misfire … Tom Cruise, star of Jack Reacher (formerly known as One Shot), in Mission: Impossible 3. Photograph: Allstar

So far, Tom Cruise has played his re-entry from the wilderness remarkably well. Tropic Thunder showed that he could make fun of himself. Rock of Ages reminded us that he's able to slot inside a larger ensemble from time to time. Mission: Impossible 4 proved that there's nobody better in the game at flinging themselves around the outside of a skyscraper. But as tactically deft as he's been so far, Cruise is still waiting for a blockbuster star vehicle to come along and fully cement his return as a force to be reckoned with.

  1. Jack Reacher
  2. Production year: 2012
  3. Countries: Rest of the world, USA
  4. Cert (UK): 12A
  5. Runtime: 130 mins
  6. Directors: Christopher McQuarrie
  7. Cast: David Oyelowo, Jai Courtney, James Martin Kelly, Richard Jenkins, Robert Duvall, Rosamund Pike, Tom Cruise, Werner Herzog
  8. More on this film

It was hoped that this would come in the form of One Shot, an adaptation of the Lee Childs novel co-starring Rosamund Pike, Robert Duvall and Werner Herzog. But yesterday, One Shot took a potentially fatal turn. Yesterday, One Shot officially became Jack Reacher.

The reason for this name change is apparently down to the potential of the movies – the character Jack Reacher has appeared in 17 novels now, so there's clearly hope that it'll become another franchise for Cruise. The problem is, though, that naming a film after a lead character is a dangerous business.

The most obvious example of this is John Carter. When plans were shelved for it to be called Princess of Mars – ostensibly because audiences hate films with the word "Mars" in the title – Andrew Stanton decided that the movie should be titled after its lead character. Which would have been great, were it not for the fact that the century-old Edgar Rice Burroughs novel it was based on wasn't the universal cultural touchstone that Stanton thought it was. As a result, audiences didn't know what the hell the film was about – other than the fact it had a bland name for a title – and the resulting box-office grosses speak for themselves.

John Carter isn't the only film to be hobbled by this tactic. Michael Clayton (2007) is perhaps George Clooney's best film to date, but it wasn't even one of the top 50 films to be released that year. A lot of that is down to the name. Who is Michael Clayton? A businessman? An astronaut? The back half of a pantomime horse? The promotional images didn't exactly give much away. The same goes for last year's Larry Crowne, a charming little film that died on its backside because nobody knew if Larry Crowne was going to be a likable underdog or a robot ninja from the future.

For a film like this to succeed, the name had better be memorable. It had better be called Rocky or Forrest Gump or Dirty Harry or Napoleon Dynamite. These are unusual names. They are not the names of someone who could feasibly work in HR, something that can't be said for Larry Crowne or John Carter.

And the notion that a franchise needs to be named after its lead character is hogswash too. For instance, no James Bond film has ever been called James Bond. Indiana Jones's first outing was called Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even Rambo didn't have the balls to slap his name on the poster first time around. Changing One Shot to Jack Reacher won't make sequels any more feasible. They'll just make people wonder why Jack Reacher has got such a stupid name.

It also doesn't help that, regardless of the film he's in, Tom Cruise just generally plays Tom Cruise anyway. The movie title is there to help us decide what sort of Tom Cruise he'll play. In The Last Samurai, the title told us that he played a war hero; something that we wouldn't know if it was called Nathan Algren. Cocktail is more evocative than Brian Flanagan. War of the Worlds is more evocative than Ray Ferrier. Minority Report is more evocative than John Anderton. And One Shot is far more evocative than Jack Reacher. At least One Shot told people what sort of film they'd be seeing. So does Jack Reacher. The problem is, it tells them that they'll be watching a dodgy bargain-bin porno.

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