Choosing a movie's title is a major step in the distribution process. As a first contact between films and their prospective audiences, titles induce a certain vision of a movie and its author. Woody Allen, a most demanding director concerning the translation of his films for export, proves especially punctilious on the matter of titles. His success relies much more on foreign markets than on the domestic circuit and French-speaking audiences are more often than not the key to his box office performance. His American and French titles are compared here, as well as the linguistic and iconographic changes operated on his films' posters, to illustrate the way chosen to export the director's persona as an original brand in the French-speaking area. His distributors play on the image built by Allen over the years, for he is seen as a true auteur in France. As a result, his French titles are kept the closest possible to the American ones, and his presence, whether as an actor or a director, is always reminded on the promotional material. These strategies have helped install each of his movies as part of a whole series, so that Allen's work has almost become a genre by itself.
