FEvery now and then a film made in the US hits these shores with a slightly different title. Ford v Ferrari, for example, was released in Britain under the name Le Mans ’66 because the use of brand names in British films was banned. “The Avengers” was called “Avengers Assemble” for fear that people would think someone had remade the terrible Ralph Fiennes spy film of the same name. Zootopia was called Zootropolis because Disney seems to enjoy randomly messing with people.

What I’m trying to say is this: There is a precedent here. If an American film has a title that seems problematic, misleading, offensive or rude, producers have no qualms about simply changing the name to something else.

And yet the movie “Carry-On” chooses not to do that.

For the uninitiated, Carry-On is an upcoming film about a young TSA agent (Taron Egerton) who is blackmailed into taking a dangerous package on a flight. In it, Jason Bateman plays the role of a mysterious stranger. It all sounds and looks like a completely normal thriller, the kind you might watch if Netflix suggested it as an available alternative to Passenger 57.

However, it is called Carry-On. And that means the majority of British viewers will only see the film expecting one of the passengers to be played by Kenneth Williams, and everyone will make a funny face when they hear the word “cockpit”. Maybe Barbara Windsor could play a flight attendant whose panties fall down when she realizes no one has adjusted the tabs. In other words, they expect fun. Problematic fun that hasn’t aged very well at all.

Of course the Americans shouldn’t know that. When they had their big meeting and presented Carry-On on a mood board to huge applause from their colleagues, they had no idea that there were 31 different films called Carry On in the UK, nor that it was so iconic were that every single Briton alive automatically thinks, “They all have it…” when they hear the word “shame.” They just didn’t know that the British psyche is so terribly repressed that they spent 20 years channeling their entire sexual identity through a series of poor comedies about nurses getting their bottoms pinched.

But what is the alternative? This is a suspense thriller about a dangerous object on a plane. In the USA this makes perfect sense, as carry-on luggage is a common term. But we don’t call it that here, do we? We call it carry-on luggage. Now imagine for a moment that you are watching a trailer in the cinema. There is Taron Egerton on board a plane, alert and nervous. There’s Jason Bateman in a baseball cap who is mysterious. There is a countdown. There is urgency. Can Egerton manage to do the right thing and save the passengers from certain doom? You’re there. You are invested. You want to see this movie. And then, at the very end, you see the words “HAND LUGGAGE”. Instant power off. Fuck this stupid movie.

Nobody would want to make a thriller with the word “baggage” in the title. It’s ugly and clumsy and instantly destroys any sense of drama. No one is going to buy a ticket to a movie that might contain a scene in which Taron Egerton rushes toward a falling duffel bag in slow motion while screaming, “Not the luggage!”

So Carry-On is damned if it sticks with its original name and damned if it opts for a more geographically appropriate name. Maybe there are other options. Stow maybe. Or “Return to Upright Position,” although the latter makes it sound a bit like a sequel to a movie called “Upright Position.” See? That’s hard.

If you think about it, there is a way to make everyone happy here. Remember Iron Man 3, where a lot of additional footage was shot just for the Chinese market and where two supporting characters worked to allay fears about the safety of domestic Chinese dairy production? Maybe we could do something similar here. The rest of the world gets Carry-On as originally intended, but the UK release contains a few scenes where a braless woman plays volleyball and a priest squints his eyes. The problem is solved there.