How The Original Title For Muppets Most Wanted Plays Into The Opening Song

It's hard to believe that we're more than a decade removed from the last feature-length Muppet movie. In the spring of 2014, Disney released the final Muppets movie — at least, the final one for now. "Muppets Most Wanted" was, like its 2011 predecessor "The Muppets," a fun, family-friendly homage to the Muppet movies of old. The 2011 film, starring Jason Segel and Amy Adams, was as much about the Muppets themselves as it was a reference-laden film riffing on the 1979 classic "The Muppet Movie." And just as "The Great Muppet Caper" sent Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, and Miss Piggy to Europe for a rollicking heist movie, "Muppets Most Wanted" sent its gaggle of Muppet characters away from the United States for an adventure that ran them afoul of Interpol and the world's first and second greatest criminal masterminds. 

Muppet movies are also nothing if they're not delightfully self-referential, breaking the fourth wall with ease. "The Muppet Movie" literally ends with one of the characters running through the screen to happily confront our heroes, while "The Great Muppet Caper" has an opening sequence in which the main protagonists comment on the people being listed in those credits. So it's no shock that "Muppets Most Wanted" goes meta instantly, with an opening song called "We're Doing a Sequel," which is about exactly what you would think. There's plenty of good pop-culture humor in the lyrics (including a prescient nod to "Toy Story 4" years before it was ever officially announced, let alone made), but the song does end on a head-scratching note, referring to the title of a movie called "The Muppets...Again." Why does the song end this way? Well, it's simple: This movie was initially going to be called "The Muppets...Again."

"The Muppets" was not perhaps the biggest box office smash when it was released in the Thanksgiving season of 2011, but it was enough of a success (and the film itself wasn't exorbitantly expensive) that Disney approved a sequel the following spring. ("The Muppets," at a reported budget of $45 million, brought in nearly $180 million worldwide at the box office, an impressive haul.) The sequel was originally titled "The Muppets...Again!," as noted in an early look at the film from Entertainment Weekly. We can debate whether or not that title really gets the excitement up, or if director James Bobin and writer Nicholas Stoller may have been better off doing a riff on the title of the film it was most directly inspired by, "The Great Muppet Caper." But the fact is, the studio had approved the title to the point that songwriter Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords had gone to the trouble of ending the opening song with that very title, leading into a title card that reads ... "Muppets Most Wanted," with the final two words of that title stamped on top of the first word. The marketing campaign was likely going to be easier, and the concept of the Muppets being wanted by the authorities somewhat aligns to what happens in the film. (Arguably, it's just Kermit himself who ends up being wanted, as he's mistaken for a criminal frog named Constantine who is his exact doppelganger with the exception of a well-placed mole above his mouth.)

Maybe if "We're Doing A Sequel" hadn't ended with the word "again" serving as the capper to the opening song, it might not seem so awkward and baffling. It's a shame, too, because the songs in this film are possibly a smidge better and funnier than those McKenzie wrote for "The Muppets." "We're Doing a Sequel" has a lot of fun nodding at other sequels like "The Godfather Part III," as well as mocking classic cinematic tropes or auteurs, riffing on everything from "Gone with the Wind" to Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal." (Of course, as /Film's review noted at the time, the song also says "the sequel's never quite as good.") But while it ends on a high note, with a slew of dancers and an Old Hollywood, Busby Berkeley-inspired dance routine, the last word leading into "Muppets Most Wanted" as the title is an odd stumble that portended the reality of where the Muppets are now as just one small piece of the very large Disney empire. Even as they continue to have some small presence at the Disney theme parks (despite the upcoming closure of Muppet*Vision 3D), the Muppets don't have a very big footprint at the House of Mouse.

"Muppets Most Wanted" is both underrated and a little frustrating, the latter for reasons like the title switch. We can only assume that Bret McKenzie would not have ended his opening song with the invocation of a title that never happened if he'd only known that the movie was going to change titles after its production ended. The same is true for anyone who paid attention to the pre-production rumblings, such as the rumor that Christoph Waltz was going to play the lead Interpol agent in the film; when scheduling got in the way, Ty Burrell stepped in and Waltz only appeared in a very brief cameo. And as much as the songs are lively, and much of the humor surrounding Constantine is very funny, "Muppets Most Wanted" does ask its audience to accept the sight of Kermit the Frog in a Siberian gulag as well as the notion that the other Muppets would completely ignore the fact that "Kermit" sounds vaguely Eastern European, doesn't get their names right, and has a much crabbier tone than ever before. It's a hard ask.

Perhaps it all started with the opening song of the film, and the sense that something wasn't completely on-target. Maybe if the title had always been planned as "Muppets Most Wanted," the song would have been a little smoother, instead of feeling like a hiccup at the end of a solid opening sequence. It's still true, as this writer once said in a ranking of all Muppet movies, that "Muppets Most Wanted" has an excellent sense of humor and is mercifully much more about the Muppets than the human celebrities whom they star alongside. And yet, now that we've gone more than a decade without a new Muppet movie, it's sad to envision this as the final entry. But this movie only made $80 million worldwide; couple that with the fact that Muppet performers keep changing, and it seems like the idea of the Muppets "again!" on screen might be an impossible dream.