7 movie titles that need to be proofread

Language errors that have been immortalized by Hollywood.

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Evidently, it is; filmmakers and film studio marketing staff have more important things to do than ensure that titles use hyphens and apostrophes correctly, employ punctuation marks appropriately, and form verbs properly, as these movie titles and posters demonstrate.

An early poster for “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” omitted the first hyphen, resulting in a title that didn’t make sense. If it were plural, it could refer to two-score 12-month-old babies, but that’s rather complicated. Fortunately, later versions were corrected, and moviegoers were left with a comforting correlation between a photograph of Steve Carell’s dorky-looking title character and a that-figures movie title.

The title of the horror/comedy “Eight Legged Freaks” appears to refer to an octet of people who may be otherwise abnormal but are equipped with legs. However, as an epithet for unusually large and aggressive spiders (apparently based on an ad lib from the star of the film, which originally bore the title “Arac Attack”), it should read “Eight-Legged Freaks”; the words eight and legged must—outside of Hollywood, that is—be hyphenated to signal that they combine as a single term modifying freaks.

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