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Changing a title year without adding a release date
Most of the time, a title's year is the same as the year of its first release date. However, there are exceptions.
I quote from IMDb's official Title formatting help page (emphasis mine):
The year in ()'s should be the year of first public screening of the title. For TV- series this is the broadcast year of the first episode/pilot. For movie titles this year is either the year of general release or of a festival presentation if earlier (note that closed screenings for the crew or the media/buyers/sellers or test screenings of the unfinished product for marketing reasons do not count as public screenings). Please note that there are occasional exceptions to this rule. If there is a long gap between the completion of a film and its first public release it can be more representative to list the year the film was completed so as to more accurately reflect the title on the associated cast and crew name pages. Please see Something's Got to Give (1962) where we use those criteria to list the title under its completion year as there was no additional work completed on the original film in the interim that would warrant the later release date being used as the main title year.
In accordance with this exception, I've tried to make some corrections recently but ran into a dead end: when making the correction, I get this message:
The film in question here is John Huston's documentary Let There Be Light, which was completed in 1946, but faced suppression for several decades before finally being released to the public. IMDb currently lists it with the year 1980, which is misleading and inconsistent with the way the title is referred to on pretty much any other website or source. It's not hard to see how this could lead to confusion for anyone searching up the title on IMDb.
Now, I could just go and submit a release date of 1946 in an attempt to get around this block, but that would be factually incorrect as it was never publicly released in 1946. I don't want to go around spreading misinformation in an attempt to make the data more accurate, that would defeat the whole purpose.
IMDb has already set a precedent allowing exceptions to be made for films like this one, and clearly outlined when it and is not appropriate to do so, but the way the current system is set up automatically blocks contributors from submitting this change the correct way. This should be fixed somehow.
For reference, here are some other titles I've noticed that are having this same problem:
Zapruder Film of Kennedy Assassination - unedited short home movie clip made in 1963; IMDb lists its year as 1970, which apparently was when it had its TV premiere. However, the film was not edited significantly in those intervening years (unsubstantiated conspiracy theories notwithstanding); the year most associated with this title should still be 1963.
I, an Actress - This one's a bit of a strange case, as the correct year of 1977 has already been submitted and approved as a release date, but the year still shows up on lists as 2005. This could be an anomaly unrelated to the point I'm making above, but it still needs correction so I might as well point it out here.
There's probably a lot more examples than just these few, but I'm running short on time right now and these are the ones I remember. I'll add more later if I find any.
Bethanny
Employee
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5.6K Messages
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58.9K Points
2 years ago
Hi @timothy_gray_el34lojg1aih1 -
We will confirm with our policy team to make sure this title applies for the exception and once we get confirmation we can change it. Will let you know.
Cheers!
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Giancarlo_Cairella
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500 Messages
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42.2K Points
2 years ago
When a title is released or screened, it is identified by the year of release. This rule is applied uniformly and consistently (if there are cases where it isn't, it's likely due to an error rather than because of a deliberate decision).
The exceptions quoted in our documentation are made for titles that are listed due to their historical significance but were never completed or released (such as Something's Got To Give, which was not finished due to Marilyn Monroe's death, or Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried (1972) which is still unreleased). In those cases, there is no release date from which to derive a year, so we use the year of production because that is the best representation of the film's chronological placement. But when a film is actually completed and released, we use the year of the actual release. If The Day the Clown Cried is eventually screened in June 2024, as allegedly stipulated by Jerry Lewis when he donated a copy to the Library of Congress, the year will be updated accordingly.
See for example Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind (2018) which was listed for many years as The Other Side of the Wind (1972) because that's when it was originally produced (mostly) but never released. When it was completed and released in 2018, the title year was changed accordingly.
Another example is Dark Blood (2012) which was listed for about two decades as Dark Blood (1993) because that's when it was filmed (and abandoned when River Phoenix died). The year was updated when a cut of the film was assembled and released 20 years later.
There are very rare cases where a title may be listed both as an unreleased film and as a released version if the latter is sufficiently different to warrant a separate title page. One such example is Henri Georges Clouzot's L'Enfer (1964) which was abandoned/unfinished back then so we list that version as a 1964 title. The existing footage was eventually incorporated in a reconstructed version/documentary that was released in 2009, and that version has its own title page as Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (2009).
John Huston's Let There Be Light was not released in 1946 (the fact that it was unreleased for 30+ years is actually part of the film's history), so it should not be listed as a 1946 title.
It is important to be consistent here because there are films that are released/screened years after being made, and films were first screened right after completion but didn't get a commercial release until much later. We need to apply the same rule to all titles. Please note that we do have specific fields for storing a title's production/filming dates (see example here) so when there is a significant discrepancy between production and release year, that's where that information can and should be stored.
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