Name Above the Movie Title? How About in It?

He turned Will Smith right into a cerulean genie for the 2019 live-action “Aladdin” and twice reimagined Sherlock Holmes as a swashbuckling rogue, to hefty box-office returns. As a filmmaker, although, Guy Ritchie has lengthy been synonymous with sprawling ensemble footage like “Snatch,” “The Gentlemen” and “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”: laddish, kinetic crime capers larded with film stars, bloodied knuckles and inscrutable Cockney accents. (The newest of such outings, an antic worldwide spy lark referred to as “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre” that includes Jason Statham, Hugh Grant and Aubrey Plaza, arrived to middling fanfare this previous March.)

So why is “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant,” a somber-looking Afghanistan conflict drama about an American sergeant (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his Afghan interpreter (Dar Salim), the primary of the director’s 15 options to formally bear his identify? The reply, in keeping with its U.S. distributor, MGM, seems to be pretty prosaic: Another firm had already asserted rights to the title. (“Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” produced by the Weinstein Company, confronted an analogous problem in court docket from Warner Brothers in 2013 and misplaced, precipitating a hasty last-minute change.)

But this sort of déjà vu is hardly new: Broad-strokes monikers like “Crash,” “Heat” and “Rush” have all done double duty over the last few decades; “Twilight” is the name of both a poorly received 1998 neo-noir starring Paul Newman and Susan Sarandon and the 2008 teen-vampire juggernaut that launched four fanged, lugubrious sequels, as well as a cult 1990 mystery by the Hungarian filmmaker György Fehér. (Ritchie might have called his latest‌ ‌ “The Interpreter” instead, had that appellation not already been claimed by a 2005 Sydney Pollack political thriller starring Nicole Kidman; so back, alas, to the drawing board.)

If the back story of “The Covenant” wanders into the weeds of copyright law, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” which won the Academy Award for best animated feature last month, makes an easier case for its qualifier: Without it, the movie could hardly be set apart from both the 1940 Disney classic still widely seen as definitive and an uncanny remake led by Tom Hanks — it currently sits at a grim 29 percent approval rating on the critical-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes — released less than two months before.

In a larger sense, though, the inclusion of del Toro’s name also serves as shorthand and a promise, portending not only the age-old tale of a wooden boy made real but the particular vision of its maker — a lush, prolific fantasist famed for the distinctive visual style and dazzling gothic grotesqueries of films like “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006) and the best picture-winning “The Shape of Water” (2017). That del Toro actually split directing duties for “his” “Pinocchio” with Mark Gustafson appears virtually a footnote. Though Gustafson, an trade journeyman with a variety of writing and animation credit (“Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the original California Raisins), shared both the stage and the statuette with del Toro at this year’s Oscars ceremony, it’s the latter’s renown, by most Hollywood metrics, that matters.

With “Pinocchio” and the 2022 Netflix horror-anthology collection “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities,” the director joins a protracted line of auteurs, from Alfred Hitchcock to Tim Burton, whose presence not merely above the title however in it serves as a stylistic marker, even when it’s not strictly their hand guiding the fabric. (The horror godhead Wes Craven habitually did the identical; see “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.”) Few, although, can declare to be the one-man trade that’s Tyler Perry, who retains full possession of the tasks produced underneath his private shingle at his stand-alone studio in Atlanta. The multihyphenate creator has famously put‌‌ his signature on a number of film and tv titles launched underneath its umbrella — together with “Tyler Perry’s A Madea Homecoming,” the latest iteration of the reliably raucous comedies that he additionally writes and stars in as a salty, well-cushioned matriarch of a sure age.

While Madea is Perry’s wholesale creation, indubitably linked to the person who wears her wig onscreen, sure mental properties with roots that attain again centuries have tilted their brims as a substitute towards a extra literal (and literary) acknowledgment of the supply. Think of the high-gloss Nineteen Nineties productions “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (directed by Francis Ford Coppola) and “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (directed by Kenneth Branagh): It takes each the funds and the private leverage of a status director, one presumes, to put declare to the definitive variations of characters who’ve lengthy been turned over to the general public area. Neither film did a lot service to those iconic novels, however present enterprise, as all the time, carries on: Coppola’s four-decades-in-the-making ardour undertaking “Megalopolis,” which wrapped taking pictures a number of weeks in the past, was funded partially, he has publicly mentioned, by his long-ago work on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” And Branagh, having just lately mined his personal Irish childhood for the dewy black-and-white drama “Belfast” (which gained him an Oscar for unique screenplay), will subsequent direct and star as Hercule Poirot in his third Agatha Christie adaptation in six years, “A Haunting in Venice,” due this September. Neither he nor Christie is formally billed within the title.