Why was the title changed to Dark Kingdom in the German release?
I just saw a trailer for Thor: The Dark World and noticed that it will be released in Germany as Thor - The Dark Kingdom. While movie titles are often changed in localized versions for various reasons (as shown in this more general question), this change from "World" to "Kingdom" seems completely arbitrary to me and I cannot imagine any of the usual reasons to apply here. If there are 10 English words any German understands "world" is one of them, neither do I have any knowledge of "dark world" being used in other contexts.
Additionally, looking at other localized titles it seems that most (if not all?) other countries also use their words for "world" (yet in their own languages, but modern German has always been quite anglophile anyway), and the other countries not listed most probably use the original title. But given that we already had previous instances of seemingly arbitrary title changes that garnered pretty definite and good answers in the end, there might in fact be a known reason behind this oddity. So why was the title of this movie changed in such a minor yet unreasonable way for the German version?
Best Answer
Actually, the answer is quite mundane:
There's a Russian fantasy/horror movie called ?????? ??? (Temny Mir) which was released in Germany (and probably other European countries, too) as "Dark World".
To avoid possible conflicts with the name holder of said production, the Thor movie's title was changed to "Dark Kingdom".
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Is it Thor the Dark World or Thor the Dark Kingdom?
Thor: The Dark World is a 2013 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character Thor, produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. It is the sequel to Thor (2011) and the eighth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).What is the Avengers called in Germany?
Although the original series was called The New Avengers, it was still Mit Schirm, Charme und Melone in Germany.Movie titles translated into GERMAN
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Answer 2
There is some speculation on this here:
Apparently Dark World doesn't translate well in German but Dark Kingdom does.
Googling and Wikipedian the Dark World and Germany resulted in a few possibilities for the change.
A few articles referred to Die Schwarze Welt or Dark World of the Afro-Germans (Afro-Deutsche) of which there are close to a 1/2 million living in Germany today. Like the Jews, Afro-Germans were rounded up and sent to concentration camps during WWII. About 50,000 Afro-Germans were gassed.
Changing the title avoids that connotation but adds an even more disturbing one: Kingdom translates to Reich in German. So pasting Malekith, his minions and the world they come from with the "Reich" word associates them as automatically evil in most Germans' mind. The marketing folks for Thor 2 are hoping that by using the English "Kingdom" they would be avoiding the unsettling layers that rise by calling it Das Schwarze Reich.
James White of Empire magazine also speculated that there might be a clash with some other film or tv series that uses the title. Recalling The Weinstein Company losing legal battle to keep "The Butler" that also makes perfect sense. I was not able to come up with any conflicting German film/TV titles though.
The Empire magazine article mentioned above is here.
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Images: Mikhail Nilov, Philip Warp, Felix Mittermeier, Pixabay