You know what they say about first impressions: You only get one chance to make them. That’s why Hollywood studios spent so much time, effort, and money crafting movie posters; testing different images, different title treatments, and especially different taglines.
Taglines are, at their core, a facet of marketing. But this facet of commerce does (or at least can) involve art as well. A good tagline can help you remember a movie, or inspire you to tell your friends about it. A great tagline will implant itself in your brain forever — in some cases, far longer than the film it is meant to advertise. How many people have used the phrase “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…” who’ve never even seenJaws 2? A lot, I would wager.
Tagline writers don’t have a lot of room to work with — in most case no more than one or two sentences — so they really need to make every word count. Thus it is a time-honored tradition of tagline writing to be a bit clever with them. You can riff on a well-known expression or everyday turn of phrase. Perhaps you throw in a pun. Maybe if you’re really feeling bold you go for the tagline Hail Mary: Some sort of sexual double entendre.
There’s no one correct way to write a funny movie tagline, but the list below contains 25 extremely solid examples. Admittedly, a couple of them may not have been meant as punchlines when they were initially written. Ultimately, the original intention matters less here than the size of the first impression they left…
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