cypher → arrr arrr arrr

Often, non-Swedish movies are given new Swedish titles for the Swedish market, e.g. The Hulk becomes Hulken. This choice is made by whoever acquires the rights for distributing the film in Sweden.

Sometimes, however, movies are given new titles that are, at best, inexplicable, and, at worst, unintentionally hilarious. Some of the worst of these occur when a movie with an English title gets a new title which is—get this—another English title.

Case in point: A week or two ago, I noticed a movie in the Swedish TV schedule that looked interesting. Its original title is Cypher, which is of course just an odd misspelling of the word “cipher”.

Now, Swedish has a perfectly good word for “cipher”, that could be used to translate this film title for Swedes who may not know the word “cipher”: The word is “chiffer”. The distributer could have chosen to call the movie Chiffer or some artificial misspelling like Skiffer or Chyffer, whatever, to emulate the original. But they made a different choice. They chose to call the movie Brainstorm.

Don’t get me wrong, “Brainstorm” is a perfectly good name for a movie. I quite liked the 1983 movie with that name, starring Christopher Walken, when I was a kid. But that’s just it; If you’re going to rename a movie to suit the local language, why choose a new name that (A) is not in the local language, (B) has already been used by no less than two other feature films, and © bears no relation to the original title! Why, oh silly film distributor, why???!?!