We include movie titles in academic, professional, and informative work. Many people wonder how to correctly format movie titles in a written work. In this lesson, you will learn what is broadly accepted and the exceptions to the general rule.
In the Past
Once upon a time, underlining and italics used to be equally acceptable when formatting movie titles in written work. As long as you were consistent, no one cared that much. We once used these things called typewriters (remember those?), and it was sometimes difficult to type italic letters on a typewriter.
With the birth of the computer, creating italics became as easy as hitting a few buttons. Now, nearly everyone puts movie titles in italics. Italicized writing, if you are wondering, is the slightly slanted version of text, as in this sentence.
The Present
Almost no one uses underlining anymore for anything, including movies, books, poems, essays, songs, articles, or short stories. The only real exception may be when handwriting something, as it is not possible to create italics when writing by hand. In this case, underlining a movie title is accepted.
The general rule for long works, like movies, or even collections of short movies, like Pixar's Short Films, is to put the title in italics. Movies, as well as a television series as a whole, like Friends, are considered long works, and are therefore italicized. This does not mean you cannot use underlining, but most modern literature, citation, and style guides agree that italics is the correct way to go when considering whether to underline or italicize movie titles.
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- The Lord of the Rings movie series is based on a trilogy of books.