Should've named it Billie Jean
Why on earth would they name a movie after Eleanor Rigby?
Why not Billie Jean?
Are there other famous song titles with a woman's first and last name in it?
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I'm so confused!
Taken from the production notes:
How did the film’s title come about?
Benson: I had been looking at the song before I began writing the script. And listening to it, there was a mood, a feeling to that song and to the characters—especially with the line “All the lonely people, where do they all come from.” From there I began thinking of this collective of people who experience their own loneliness and I wrote that line in a notebook. It became something that helped me create the proper emotional space for me to write. Then I thought why not name the character after that and create this moment behind her name. Cassandra knows from working together that I love this idea of the disconnect between the baby boomer generation and my generation. And so I wanted to use the Beatles as just this abstract reference in the film where Eleanor’s parents name their daughter after this infamous song and it sort of bridges the two generations.
Kulukundis: And if you take what happens in the film, Eleanor just disappears. She’s disappeared from Conor’s life, from the person he knew and he’s trying to find her. So it kind of captured that feeling.
And in response to your reply in that other thread:
The example of Avatar doesn't work. There's a very definite point to establishing copyright in the case of Avatar. Cameron did it with the specific purpose of not wanting another movie to have the same name, already knowing that there's a cartoon franchise out there that has the exact word in its title as well. And with three more sequels to his own franchise in the works, creative interest is immediately at stake. So it makes perfect sense that he would see the need to safeguard it.
It's different when it comes to titles being borrowed or shared between different creative mediums. Iron Man first appeared in comic books in 1963. Black Sabbath has a similarly titled song released in their 1970 album Paranoid but from what I can tell has absolutely nothing to do with the Marvel-conceived character. And when it comes to movie titles incorporated from songs or vice versa, there's a long list, a lot of which has nothing much to do with the one another. Here, you can see for yourself:
http://www.songfacts.com/category-songs_that_are_also_the_names_of_mov ies.php
The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby isn't even really a title that can be said was borrowed entirely from the song. It uses the name of one of its protagonists who was named after the song. If the song isn't included in the soundtrack, it's likely because they couldn't afford the rights to it, being an independently funded project and all. But since people know the song, they can easily check it out for themselves.
Besides the reason that Benson provided, the Beatles, along with many other artists, are iconic. People use them as elements to help tell stories or to establish characters, without using them as an essential part of the story itself. There's absolutely no clashing of creative interests here so I find all this talk of the movie title being 'stolen' from the Beatles much ado about nothing.
You seem rather fixated on the name Billie Jean. If you ever write a story around that name and make a movie out of it, I might check it out.
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