During the winter of 2023, Daniel Welch, a longtime front-of-house usher at Film at Lincoln Center, sat in the box office. A middle-age woman approached the window and asked for a ticket to “Upside Down, Anyways.” Welch was flummoxed. The Upper West Side theater was not playing a film called “Upside Down, Anyways” (and according to IMDb and Letterboxd, no such movie exists).
Following some back and forth, however, Welch realized the woman actually wanted a ticket for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which was screening at the theater.
After the woman departed, correct tickets in hand, Welch turned to the box office computer, opened a Google doc called “WRONG MOVIE TITLES,” and entered “Upside Down, Anyways” onto an eternally growing list of incorrect film names given by patrons.
For more than three years, the box office staff at Film at Lincoln Center has been diligently cataloging all the delightfully incorrect movie titles given by theatergoers, noting everything from near misses like turning “In the Mood for Love” into “In the Name of Love” to baffling mutations like changing “Anatomy of a Fall” to “An Economy of a Murder.”
The now 27-page list recounts patrons who asked for tickets to “The Croods” instead of “The Shrouds,” “Wallace and Hermit” in place of “Wallace and Gromit” and “The Station Guard” rather than “The Secret Agent.” “Corsage” became “Bouquet,” “Hard Truths” became “Heart Break,” and “Between the Temples” became “Across the Street.”
Even the sharpest cinephiles misremember movie titles occasionally, but typically these gaffes either become bits of family lore (such as when my grandmother referred to “A River Runs Through It” as “In the Middle of the Creek”) or are lost to time completely. The Film at Lincoln Center log, however, immortalizes these pearls of accidental humor.
“In real life, I would immediately exit the box office, go to whoever’s tearing tickets, and be like, ‘Hey, I just got someone that said something crazy,’” Welch said. “So the list is just a manifestation of these real-life conversations, and it’s funny every time.”
While Welch created the Lincoln Center version of the list, he brought the idea with him from Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Mass., where he worked previously.
According to Coolidge Corner’s office and merchandise manager, Erin Gilmour, their wrong-movie-list tradition dates back to the 1990s, when the theater’s floor staff would leave notes for one another, documenting the most egregious flubs. Those notes evolved into a clipboard in the box office to document errors that included changing “Bend It Like Beckham” to “Bend Over Pac-Man” and someone who pronounced “The Namesake” as “Na-ma-sa-ke” (rhymes with Nagasaki). Eventually, a digital list was created, with Coolidge Corner’s current 96-page version originating in 2017 (when someone referred to “The Beguiled” as “The Big Girl.”)
“You can’t imagine how much fun it is to pull this Google doc up at a party,” Gilmour said with a laugh.
In their tracking of box office flubs, the Film at Lincoln Center staff has pinpointed two categories of titles that are especially prone to mutilation. The first are long, wordy titles like that of the 2026 Oscar nominee for best international feature, “It Was Just an Accident,” which has been misnamed “It Couldn’t Be an Accident,” “It Was a Misunderstanding,” “In Case of an Accident” and “It Really Doesn’t Matter,” among others. Another Iranian film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” has been called “The Bad Seed,” “Seed of the Forbidden Fig,” “Seed of the Sacred Fog” and “Seed of the Sacred Pig” at the box office.
Films with unusual names are the other oft-butchered group. The 2022 movie “EO,” named after the sound a donkey makes, was called “Eos,” “AO,” “OA,” “EQ,” “Echo” and (aptly) “Eeyore.” The baseball narrative “Eephus” (2025) similarly got bungled to “Elphus,” “Oofus,” “Eephias” and “Ephebus.” The prize for most incorrect pronunciations, however, goes to the winner for best picture at the 2025 Oscars: “Anora,” which boasts over 30 mutations, including “Anita,” “Andora,” “Aurora,” “Amore,” “Ansara,” “Norma,” “Anorak,” “Enola,” “Adorna” and “Eleanor.”
Betsy Black, another member of the Film at Lincoln Center staff, says incorrect titles are given daily, with certain movies spawning countless blunders. “With ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’ playing,” she said of a recent title, “so many people come in and just throw family roles out at you, and you have to use deductive reasoning.” Black remembers “suffocating” with laughter when she was first shown the list, and now looks forward to receiving notifications that the Google doc has been updated.
Whether it be incorrectly referring to “May December” as “Wednesday Friday,” misremembering “Familiar Touch” as “Velvet Fabric” or asking for a ticket to “Hitler” instead of “The Death of Stalin,” the wrong movie titles continue to spark joy for the box office workers.
“It never ends,” said Welch. “As long as they’re making movies, you can keep adding more. No one’s ever going to get them right.”
Parody movie posters by Tala Safie; photos: Neon (“Anora” and “Anatomy of a Fall”); A24 (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”); Nan Goldin (“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”); Focus Features (“The Beguiled”); Netflix (“May December”); Christine Parry/Fox Searchlight Pictures (“Bend It Like Beckham”)
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