Mayor Ebert – Godzilla

Roger Ebert’s public humiliation for writing down his own opinions didn’t stop at Willow, either. Roland Emmerich’s films have never had a particularly easy time from the critics, and Ebert (who, again, has never been that harsh) took the brunt of his anger when he needed a name for the fat, stressed, over-reacting mayor in the infamous 1998 version of Godzilla.

further reading – Godzilla 1998: What Went Wrong?

To make the reference clearer, Emmerich called the Mayor’s sidekick “Gene.” Ebert gave the film a pasting when it came out, but seemed quite pleased by the name shaming. “Now that I’ve inspired a character in a Godzilla movie, all I really still desire is for several Ingmar Bergman characters to sit in a circle and read my reviews to one another in hushed tones.”

David and Walter – Alien: Covenant

Before Alien: Covenant, everyone assumed that the franchise was just running through the alphabet with its robot names. Ash, Bishop, Call, David… and then we had Walter. Maybe the original plan really was to stick to the alphabet (Edgar?) and Ridley Scott just decided to mess it up, but David and Walter were actually named after the film’s producers, Walter Hill and David Giler. “They don’t know,” Scott told Digital Spy. “because I didn’t ask them.”

Qi’ra – Solo

Qi’ra actually started out as “Kira”, and Kira started out as “Keera”, and Keera was the original name for Rey. “[JJ Abrams] told me it was meant to be Keera,” Ridley told V Magazine. “And then, when we were already shooting in Abu Dhabi, he told me that he was thinking of going with Rey, which I thought was frickin’ awesome.” So what happened to Keera? Writer Lawrence Kasdan worked on Solo after The Force Awakens, and it looks like he took his favorite name with him after Abrams changed it.

Michael Myers – Halloween