As the director behind Edge Of Tomorrow, Doug Liman has some experience with bad movie titles. By most accounts, Edge Of Tomorrow was a really good action movie with a great hook, but its combination of Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, robot suits, and faceless alien hordes was still somehow not enough to get people really excited. The studio pinned the blame on its awful title, rebranding the film as Live Die Repeat: Edge Of Tomorrow for its home video release—even though that was a little bit like putting really nice deck chairs on the Titanic by that point.
Now, with Liman and Cruise reuniting for Mena, a movie about a real-life pilot who worked as a drug runner for Pablo Escobar and then got recruited by the CIA, Universal has decided to preemptively step in and change that title before the movie gets released. Instead of Mena, the film will be the infinitely more marketable American Made, which should at least give it a nice boost among people who decide which movies to watch based solely on how patriotic they sound.
That news comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which also says that American Made has been bumped from its January 6, 2017 release date to September 29, 2017. THR’s sources say the new date is “a better fit,” but we’re hoping the delay was so Liman could throw in a scene where Cruise says that his drug-runner plane is “American made” and then winks at the camera.