#LessAmbitiousMovies

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About

#LessAmbitiousMovies is a Twitter hashtag used to alter popular film titles to make them sound trivial and mundane.

Origin

The first tweet with the hashtag #LessAmbitiousMovies was posted by concept artist Rob McCallum^[5] on January 4th, 2011, which parodied the title of the 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

Scott Pilgrim vs The Room #lessambitiousfilms

— Rob McCallum (@Rob_McCallum) January 4, 2011

Spread

Several hours later, Twitter user @adwebbow^[9] replied to the tweet with an altered version of Around the World in Eighty Days:

@Rob_McCallum @greghemphill69 Around The Town In Eighty Days #lessambitiousfilms

— Adam Webbow (@adwebbow) January 4, 2011

The tweets began picking up momentum in the following hours after the hashtag was used by Scottish comedian Greg Hemphill, who had over 3,000 followers at the time of his post:

A Bride for a Brother #lessambitiousfilms

— Greg Hemphill (@greghemphill69) January 4, 2011

The same day, TechCrunch^[3] writer Alexia Tsotsis published an article about the trend and reported it was pacing at 200 tweets per minute. On January 5th, BuzzFeed^[4] and The Huffington Post^[11] posted round-ups of notable #LessAmbitiousMovies tweets and Forbes^[10] published an article about the microblogging trend. The same day, pop singer Katy Perry retweeted Twitter user @OhFerras's alternative title for the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan, making it the most retweeted #LessAmbitiousMovies title.

Hahhahhahahahah RT @OhFerras: @miamoretti Desperately Seeking Slutzanne#lessambitiousmovies

— Katy Perry (@katyperry) January 5, 2011

Website

The domain for the site lessambitiousmovies.org^[8] was registered on January 5th, 2011. The site features user submitted less ambitious movie posts, but it has been since taken over by spam accounts. The site’s Twitter account @LessAmbitMovies^[7] has 412 followers and the “Less Ambitious Movies” Facebook page has 45 likes as of February 21st, 2012.

Volume

The Twitter analytics site BackType^[6] published statistics related to the trend on January 7th. They found that there had been 364,000 tweets by 81,000 Twitter users, 17 tweets sent per second at its peak which reached up to 27 million total users. The data was subsequently reported by TechCrunch^[1] the same day.