When Andrey Zvyagintsev’s bleak Russian epic Leviathan premiered at last year’s Cannes film festival to great acclaim, observant – and pedantic – cineastes remarked on its familiar title. Back in 2012, a documentary also called Leviathan garnered strong reviews if little attention, thanks to its slow-paced look at the state of the fishing industry.

Meanwhile, any self-respecting B-movie completist has been smugly rifling through their VHS collection to show off a copy of 1989 underwater horror Leviathan, which starred Peter Weller and Ernie Hudson and some ridiculous monster thing. Yet all of this has just been eclipsed by news that another damn film is being made with the same damn name.

Today has seen an announcement that District 9 and Chappie director Neill Blomkamp and X-Men writer/producer Simon Kinberg have come onboard to produce a new sci-fi project called The Leviathan, a story set in the 22nd century about travel faster than the speed of light/air monsters. While the title does boast a radical change to the formula (note addition of the definite article), it’s a surprising choice, given the Oscar-nominated notoriety of the most recent Leviathan.

But the market for the anti-Putin Hobbes-doffing satire will be nothing compared to the multiplex crowds targeted for the upcoming action film, as suggested by this impressively epic proof-of-concept teaser. There’s always the chance that the title might be changed, given that it’s still to find a studio home, but the audiences for the two films exist in vastly different categories, with a crossover so small it’s unlikely to cause confusion.

Forest Whitaker as the butler in Lee Daniels’ The Butler aka The Butler.

Given the fact that we’re in 2015, it’s no great surprise that we’re starting to run out of original movie titles (there are over 70 films called Love) but “leviathan” isn’t quite such a commonly-used word. Given its surprising IMDb frequency (there are actually 14 exact title matches), a lawsuit is probably not on the horizon. If only those poor Weinsteins had been so lucky. In 2013, they faced a legal battle over the title of sugary Oscar-bait The Butler after Warner Bros claimed it owned rights to the wording after releasing a 1919 silent short of the same name. The disagreement resulted in the film being renamed Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

But this isn’t common practice. Every year, films are released that share the same title as an unrelated pre-existing release (Birdman and Boyhood were not the first films to use those titles, for example) but it’s rarely a problem that gets to the courtroom. In the case of The Butler, or Lee Daniels’ The Butler or Your Mum’s Selma, it was reportedly down to industry politics. Warner Bros was aggrieved that the Weinsteins had tried to have the name of Reese Witherspoon drama The Good Lie changed as it was similar to Weinstein-controlled title The Good Life, with little success.

The problem is that film titles can’t be copyrighted but they are entered into the Title Registration Bureau, where studios have to register them and if any similar titles crop up, a waiver must be obtained from the previous title-holder. Warner Bros claimed that the Weinsteins didn’t play by the rules so punished them as a result. As well as retaining their title, Warner Bros also received a tidy $400k for the trouble.

Another reason behind title change is to avoid confusing international audiences such as The Avengers becoming The Avengers Assemble in the UK or Neighbors turning into Bad Neighbours, both to avoid anyone thinking that either TV show was being adapted. In the case of the many leviathans, the next title-bearer could then end up being Leviathans Assemble or Bad Leviathan in Russia, both of which we would watch.

It’s likely that post-The Leviathan, the title will end its surprisingly illustrious life and become engulfed into a franchise, making it too closely associated to be reused and also, possibly, involved in more complicated rights issues. But hey, what a life.