Movie Charades: 100+ Film Titles and How to Act Them

Film titles for charades sorted by difficulty, plus the gestures for sequels, one-word titles and films nobody can mime — and why humming is banned.

4 min read

Movie charades is the version most people mean when they say charades. It is also the version that stalls most often, because a film title is a name rather than a thing, and names have no obvious gesture.

The trick is not better acting. It is a shared set of signals for "this is a film", "this is a sequel", "this is the third word". Those are below, along with 100+ titles sorted by how hard they are to perform. The Movies pack has 60 of them published in full and playable in the browser.

The signals every group should agree on

Before the first round, agree on four gestures. They cost thirty seconds to explain and they save every round afterwards.

It is a film: crank an old-fashioned camera with one hand.
Number of words: hold up fingers.
Which word you are doing: hold up fingers again, then start.
Sounds like: tug your earlobe, then act the rhyming word.

Humming is out for films. Songs get a tune; titles do not. If someone can hum the Jaws theme the round is over in two seconds and nobody had any fun. Say this out loud before you start, because at least one person will try it.

Easy film titles

One concrete image each, and almost everybody has seen them.

Jaws, Titanic, Frozen, Rocky, Up, Cars, Shrek, Bambi, Dumbo, Tarzan, King Kong, Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Home Alone, Toy Story, The Lion King, Finding Nemo, Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, The Little Mermaid, Monsters Inc

Medium film titles

Two or three ideas that have to be strung together.

Back to the Future, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, The Matrix, Forrest Gump, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Silence of the Lambs, Beauty and the Beast, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, The Hunger Games, Men in Black, The Karate Kid, Free Willy, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Groundhog Day, The Sixth Sense, Ocean's Eleven, Saving Private Ryan, The Devil Wears Prada, Slumdog Millionaire, The Social Network, Mamma Mia, Inside Out

Hard film titles

Abstract, long, or with nothing physical in them at all. Give these ninety seconds.

Inception, Interstellar, Pulp Fiction, Casablanca, Goodfellas, The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Apocalypse Now, Fight Club, Memento, The Shawshank Redemption, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Whiplash, Parasite, Everything Everywhere All at Once, La La Land, Gone Girl, Black Swan, The Departed, Schindler's List, Gladiator, Braveheart

Animated films for a family game

Frozen, Moana, Encanto, Coco, Up, Wall-E, Ratatouille, Brave, Tangled, Zootopia, Luca, Turning Red, Soul, Onward, The Incredibles, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, Ice Age, How to Train Your Dragon, Despicable Me, Sing, Trolls, Puss in Boots, Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro

How to act the difficult ones

One-word abstract titles. Break the word into syllables and use "sounds like". "Inception" is unactable as a whole; "in" plus "sept" plus "shun" is not.

Titles with a name in them. Act the character, not the word. Nobody can mime "Indiana", but everyone recognises a whip and a hat.

Sequels. Act the first film, then hold up fingers for the number. This is why the "number of words" signal matters — without it, "Toy Story 3" takes the entire minute.

Titles that are a sentence. Do the words out of order. Start with the one that has a shape and let the team fill in the rest. "The Silence of the Lambs" is much easier if you start with the lamb.

Making movie charades harder or easier

Difficulty in movie charades is mostly about the audience, not the title. A room of film fans will get Goodfellas faster than a general room gets Titanic. Two adjustments work better than swapping the list:

Change the timer. Ninety seconds for the hard list, forty-five for the easy one. Same words, completely different game.

Restrict the signals. Taking away "sounds like" makes any title dramatically harder, because syllable-splitting is the escape hatch for everything abstract.

More of this is covered in the charades rules.