John Rambo, John Wicke, John McClane. If you follow action movies, it might become apparent after a while that John is an overly-common name for action heroes. So is James and Jack. Many people come to this realization on their own, but even Hollywood figures have noticed it, although no one admits to naming a character that way on purpose. But does it just seem that way after you've noticed it? Demetria Glace wanted the hard data, and crunched the numbers. Wikipedia lists 2,206 modern action films, beginning with Dr. No in 1962. Glace removed the movies with ensemble heroes and female leads and used a list of the remaining 790 movies featuring a solo male hero. The most popular name of those heroes was John, with 74, followed by 50 heroes named James, and 37 named Jack. All other names were way fewer. Even when the list was revised to take out sequels (adjusting for James Bond), the results were similar.
Sure, those are popular names overall, but the number of action movie heroes were still outliers when compared to real people given those names at birth. And compared to villains in the same list of movies. Why is this happening? Glace gives us four theories and their pros and cons, including this one by Keanu Reeves:
Ten years ago, when a Quora user asked, “Why are so many leading men in movies called Jack?” the movie critic Carrie Rickey responded with an anecdote about the time, decades earlier, when she asked Keanu Reeves this same eternal question. Reeves is a serial offender, having played Jack Traven in Speed, Johnny Utah in Point Break, Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, John Constantine in Constantine, and Johnny Mnemonic and John Wick in the action movies of the same name. Reeves replied to Rickey, “When you say ‘Jack,’ the shape your mouth takes, the breath it takes, signifies loner, hero, renegade. … Think John the Baptist, Johnny Guitar, Johnny Suede, Jack the Ripper, jack-o’-lantern.”
None seem to be the definitive answer, but maybe a combination of those theories, laid out at Salon, explain all those Johns, James, and Jacks. -via Metafilter