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A movie title can tell people a whole lot about the movie; there’s no question about what an audience will see when they sit down to watch something like Planet of the Apes or Star Wars. And when a movie’s title contains the name of a character, like Batman or Nell, most people will figure that the titular character will be the focus of the film.
But sometimes, a character’s name is part of the title of a movie that they’re barely in. These characters are still greatly important to the overall story, but they may not be the main character of the film. On rare occasions, they may not even show up in the movie, which makes it all the more amazing that they get to be in the title.
10 Beetlejuice Only Appears For 17 Minutes
One of the best-known examples of a titular character barely being in the film is Beetlejuice. The Tim Burton film stars Michael Keaton as “The Ghost with the Most” as he goes about causing a whole lot of problems for the Deetz family after the ghosts of Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis call on him, with the whole adventure coming to a close during a rather unconventional wedding.
In those sparse 17 minutes, Keaton, Burton, and the makeup team of Steve La Porte, Ve Neill, and Robert Short created an iconic character who is still loved to this day.
9 Forgetting Sarah Marshall Is More Of A Plot Device Than A Character
When Kristen Bell’s Sarah Marshall broke up with Jason Segel’s Peter Bretter, Peter decides to go on vacation in Hawaii to try and get over the heartbreak. Sadly for Peter, he ends up at the same exact resort Sarah Marshall is staying at with her new boyfriend.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall features a fair amount of Kristen Bell as the character, but she is rarely if ever the actual focus of a scene. Most of what the viewer knows about Sarah Marshall comes from how others explain or imagine her, not from her own actions or words.
8 Private Ryan Barely Shows Up For Saving Private Ryan
Steven Spielberg’s amazing World War II drama Saving Private Ryan is a heartwrenching and intense story of a group of soldiers sent out to find and protect one man; Private First Class James Francis Ryan. With his brothers all killed in action, the United States government has decided that Private Ryan must make it home to his mom, no matter the cost.
That cost ends up being most of the men who are sent out to save Ryan, including Vin Diesel, Giovanni Ribisi, and Tom Hanks. Ryan, played by Matt Damon, doesn’t actually show up until the final act of the film.
7 The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Has Very Little Smaug
After the massive success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson chose to take J.R.R. Tolkien’s other classic novel set in Middle Earth, The Hobbit, and turn that into three movies as well. The problem was that while Lord of the Rings was based on three books that consisted of over 1200 pages, The Hobbit was just a single 300-page book.
To stretch The Hobbit across three films, Jackson had to pad out the running time with a lot of added moments and long action scenes. In the second film, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the dragon doesn’t show up until the last act of the nearly three-hour-long film.
6 Waiting For Guffman Is A Long Wait
The now-classic mockumentary that stars Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, and Catherine O’Hara, Waiting for Guffman tells the story of a small-town community theater troupe as they prepare to put on a production of Red, White, and Blaine, an original musical written by the troupe’s eccentric director Corky St. Clair.
When word spreads that Broadway producer Mort Guffman will be coming to the show, the wildness really kicks off as everyone begins to dream of stardom. While Mort Guffman is the catalyst of the story, the character is never actually seen in the film.
5 You’ll Never Stop Searching for Bobby Fischer
Based on the life of prodigy chess player Joshua Waitzkin and the book by his father, Searching for Bobby Fischer explores the life of a seven-year-old Joshua as he becomes interested in chess and his historic rise to prominence in the chess world. In the film, as it was in life, Joshua’s father Fred became obsessed with his son’s chess career, pushing the child to play more and more.
Fred believed that his son could be the next Bobby Fischer, a chess prodigy who, at 14, became the youngest ever U.S. Chess Champion. In time, Fred comes to see that his obsession with Joshua’s rise in the chess world is hurting the child more than it is helping him. Fischer only appears in the film through newsreel footage of his time as a player.
4 The Bourne Legacy Is Lacking One Jason Bourne
When The Bourne Identity came out in 2002, no one expected it to kick off a franchise that would turn Matt Damon into an action star, but that was exactly what happened. With 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy and 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum each building on the success of the previous film, Universal Pictures wanted to make a fourth film, but Matt Damon felt that the third film was a fitting ending to the character.
Not deterred by losing their star, Universal moved forward with The Bourne Legacy, starring Jeremy Renner as Aaron Cross. In the film, Renner is another soldier that was part of the same supersoldier program that created Bourne and is now being hunted down to erase all evidence of the program. Jason Bourne never shows up in the movie.
3 Khan Isn’t The Focus Of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Ricardo Montalbán first played Khan Noonien Singh in the 1967 Star Trek episode “Space Seed.” His return in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan fifteen years later excited fans and led to what is arguably the best of the 13 Star Trek films.
Compared to others on this list, Khan has a fair amount of screentime in Wrath of Khan, but he never actually comes into contact with the main characters on the Enterprise. The only way Captain Kirk ever sees his nemesis is through a viewscreen as the two men battle it out in their separate starships.
2 The Bride of Frankenstein Shows Up For One Scene
Played by Elsa Lanchester, The Monster’s Bride in The Bride of Frankenstein has become the most loved of the Universal Classic Monster Movies, and her image now appears on as much merchandise as Dracula, the Wolf Man, and even Frankenstein’s Monster himself.
But the character only shows up for the final scene of the one and only film she is in. Her creation is the overall focus of the film, with the delightfully mad Doctor Pretorius pushing Henry Frankenstein to recreate the experiment that created the Monster in the first film, but it isn’t until the last few minutes of the film that the Bride actually comes to life.
1 Bill Hardly Shows Up For Kill Bill
Quentin Tarantino’s revenge epic starring Uma Thurman as The Bride, Kill Bill was split into two films, telling the story of Beatrix Kiddo as she crossed the globe getting revenge on her old team, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, who had tried to kill her years prior, saving the team’s leader, Bill, for last.
Totaling over four hours across the two movies, the titular Bill, played by David Carradine, shows up for just 39 minutes, or roughly 15% of the length of the story. Still, his presence is felt in almost every scene, and the payoff is well worth the wait.
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