Punctuationitis. It’s the dizzying condition that afflicts anyone looking at a list of the highest-grossing films of 2011 in the United States and Canada. (It’s also known as the sequel to Sequelitis.) It’s what happens when the movie theatres are riddled with multipart series, remakes and franchise reboots, necessitating title punctuation that would have confounded Strunk and White.
The top seven films at the domestic box office in the year just ended, in ascending order, are Cars 2; Fast Five; Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; The Hangover Part II; The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1; Transformers: Dark of the Moon; and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the champ with a $381-million (U.S.) gross.
Or, in other words: a sequel that uses a numeral; a quintquel that spells out its number in its title; a quadquel that omits all numbers but employs a colon; a sequel denoted by a Roman numeral; a triquel that’s the first part of an adaptation of book three in a trio; a quadquel that opts only for a colon; and the seventh film from the sixth novel of a series that, until the final book was split into two movies, eschewed all numerals, numbers and punctuation marks in favour of a conjunction (i.e., Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, et al.).
Are you still with me? I hope so, because the craziness doesn’t end there. Scrolling down the list to No. 14, we find X-Men: First Class, a prequel to a comic book film trio that uses both a hyphen and a colon; and, at No. 18, the finger-cramping Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, employing a dash and a colon and no number, though it is the fourth in a franchise, and a reboot of a TV series.
Then there’s the rash of parentheses, which can indicate a rerelease, as in The Lion King (in 3-D), No. 32 on the 2011 list; or an English-language remake, as in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), No. 51; or a reboot of an earlier film, as in both Footloose (2011) and Drive (2011), Nos. 61 and 91.
I can only imagine the marketing-department meetings, thick with copy editors and grammarians fighting valiantly to parse their titles. Did someone get fired for deciding to spell out Happy Feet Two, which hit only No. 50 on the list? Super 8 managed to come in at No. 20, despite the fact that it wasn’t a sequel – though I’m sure some ticket buyers stayed away because they thought they’d missed Super’s 1 through 7. And what will they call the sequel? Super 9? Super 8.2? Ditto for I Am Number Four at No. 56 – where were I Am’s One through Three? Maybe 50/50 climbed only to No. 90 because audiences were scratching their heads about the other 49.
Seriously, though, what are we to make of 2011’s box-office hits? Rounding out the Top 10 were two comic-book movies (Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger) and a series reboot (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). Clearly, all three are expecting to be back, with more numerals in their titles and more dollars in their coffers. Only at Nos. 11 (The Help) and 12 (Bridesmaids) did original films surface, and they had to share the rest of the Top 20 with five more sequels, including Kung Fu Panda 2 (numeral; no punctuation) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (colon but no number).
