Disney Changes Movie Title to Avoid Confusion with Pornstar
Mark Felt, the FBI informant who helped break the Watergate scandal, was nicknamed “Deep Throat” by the writers at the Washington Post. That name, taken from one of the most famous porn movies of the 1970s, became a part of the lexicon, but Disney is eager to avoid a similar conflation of porn and pop culture with its latest animated release. According to Variety, they’ve changed the name of their upcoming movie Moana to Oceania in Italy to prevent any possible confusion with the late pornstar Moana Pozzi.
“There are two very simple reasons for the title change,” an Italian marketing guru told Variety. “One is that if you type ‘Moana’ and do a Google search in Italy you risk coming up with porn videos. And it’s very expensive and a waste of money to try and change that.” The other reason is that “in any Italian focus group ‘Moana’ is Moana Pozzi the porn star.”
Pozzi died in 1994, before the era of Adult Empire and digital media, but some of her movies still appear on AE’s website as a part of older compilations. And she apparently still maintains enough cultural currency in Italy to keep a strong association with the word “Moana” in the mind of audiences there.
It’s not the first time a studio has had to alter a foreign title or tagline to avoid a blush-inducing association. Distributors changed the Australian tagline of 1998’s Payback when it was realized that “Get ready to root for the bad guy” didn’t take into account that “root” means “fornicate” in Aussie slang. And Universal had to make subtle adjustments to the title of Jaws 2 when they discovered that the French translation of the movie’s name sounded like “The Teeth of the Shit.”