Warner Bros.(NEW YORK) — What’s in a name? Ask Warner Bros. After a its new movie Birds of Prey failed to slay at the box office over the weekend, the studio is reportedly switching things up to spotlight its star, Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn.
Meet Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey.
While the official title has always been Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), that’s not fitting on any marquee, so Birds of Prey was chosen instead — however, the studio apparently feels that created some confusion with some moviegoers, who didn’t realize the film was the spin-off of Robbie’s character, who many saw as the highlight of the commercially successful but critically drubbed Suicide Squad.
Birds of Prey scored well with fans and critics, which is what’s likely behind WB giving the movie a fresh coat of paint.
Purists also sniffed that Birds of Prey was a DC Comics series that didn’t have anything to do with Harley, and instead centered on the characters Huntress, Black Canary, and Detective Renee Montoya, who were more part of Harley’s squad as presented in the movie. They were played, respectively by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, and Rosie Perez.
Incidentally, this re-titling is reminscent of 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow being quickly re-launched as Live, Die, Repeat, when some thought the Tom Cruise sci-fi film sounded more like a romantic movie a la The Notebook, and not the time-skipping action thriller it actually was.
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