A new breed of bottom feeder is roaming the boardrooms of Hollywood studios and attempting to score a quick buck: the title consultant. This is the guy attempting to convince producers that the reason The Shawshank Redemption failed at the box office is because its name was off-putting, not because many moviegoers prefer explosions to brutal scenes of abject hopelessness and gay gang-rape.

Seth Lockhart, one half of the marketing company TitleDoctors, describes the motivation behind his life’s pursuit as such: “When movie titles don’t work, studios are leaving potential earnings on the table.” Lockhart swears his job is necessary, despite the fact that there’s tons of evidence to the contrary:

Lockhart points to exceptions such as the Hugh Grant comedy “Love, Actually,” a hit despite a title he calls stilted.

and

Last summer, Lockhart … tried to persuade Sony to change the title of “Hancock,” a big-budget action comedy starring Will Smith as an alcoholic superhero known as John Hancock. They told studio executives they thought the current title was vague and pitched alternatives such as “Heroes Never Die.”

Sony believes it made the right move in sticking with “Hancock,”
…
Despite the disagreement over “Hancock,” Lockhart says that Smith … “is probably the one star in the world who is title-proof. This movie could be called ‘John Doe,’ and it wouldn’t matter.”

and also

Whether the title was responsible for helping “Something’s Gotta Give” gross $267 million in worldwide ticket sales is unknown.

Conclusion: By their own admission, title consultants are irrelevant. And even if they’re not, they have nothing but speculation to support their claims that movies did poorly or well because of their titles. Therefore, we find the name TitleDoctors misleading and suggest it be changed to IdiotConmenWhoAreGenerallyUseless.