Just Stop Already! Issue #4: Bad Movie Posters

Just Stop Already!

Movies are a great art form, but Hollywood is a business. If something translates into a financial success—whether a type of movie or trend or genre—chances are it will be exploited and repeated until people are sick of it. Sometimes producers, writers, and/or directors want to cut corners, or are desperate to make money, or are creatively bankrupt. These factors result in frustrations for the audience that take on many forms, and in this series I explore some of the tropes, trends, bad habits, and financial exploits of Hollywood films. Sometimes when it comes to movies, I want to say…just stop already!

 

Issue #4: Bad Movie Posters

 

Last time I went over bad movie titles, and this other topic relates closely with that issue as another form of film advertisement that has declined significantly in recent years. A movie can have a great title, but if that title is slapped on a half-assed poster it won’t really matter because, as the old cliché goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Modern movie posters are similar to modern movie trailers in that they’re frequently cluttered and chaotic, but they’re different in that they are uninspired, unoriginal, uninteresting images that rarely accomplish the intended purpose. While movie trailers have generally gotten better and better over the years in terms of tight editing and creative use of visuals, posters have gotten worse, to the point that I don’t even seek out posters as a way to learn about a movie anymore. Here’s one reason: why are so many posters just collections of floating faces? Seriously, there are too many examples of this to even name. Just look at pretty much any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe posters. All three of the Tom Holland Spider-Man films have basically the same one.

Beyond the generic collection of faces, new posters often have the same issues no matter what the genre or content. Do you like the colours orange and blue? If so, you might be a Hollywood marketing strategist, because they are obsessed with those colours. There’s actually a reason for this. Blue and orange are on opposite sides of the colour wheel, which make them complimentary colours. Unfortunately, their overuse also makes many posters have a bland sameness, even if the other elements of the poster are unique.

Character posters for The Suicide Squad

Another new trend related to the collection of floating faces is the character poster. Instead of just having one bad poster, why not make a whole bunch of bad posters featuring individual characters/actors? It must be cheap and easy to produce them, because since the Marvel movies started using them in what was initially a clever way with 2012’s The Avengers (since it featured so many big characters), all kinds of movies have had a series of character posters, even when it’s completely unnecessary. If it’s a film with multiple characters from a pre-established IP that general audiences might not know, it can be useful (Godzilla: King of the Monsters used them successfully in this way), but when an original film with characters no one has ever seen before issues several character posters with names like “Jack” and “Sandie” and “Eloise” imposed over the image, it comes off as pointless, especially when they don’t end up being characters audiences are likely to remember. Those names are from the character posters for Last Night in Soho, by the way, and it’s not a criticism of the actual film. I haven’t seen it, but having those kinds of posters for a movie like that just feels desperate. It’s like if there were posters of just Doc and Biff and George and Lorraine for Back to the Future.

Example of a GOOD poster

Speaking of Back to the Future…what a great poster for a great movie! It makes use of the orange and blue tones, which is fine, but it also employs that 1980’s aesthetic of appearing painted by hand, though still lifelike, with Marty looking at his watch in trepidation with one foot in the DeLorean. Except, is it the DeLorean? If you look closely, the car doesn’t really match the one seen in the actual movie, but movie posters have falsely advertised movies to varying degrees since the beginning (often unintentionally) so I won’t fault it for a little discrepancy like that. The realistic painted aesthetic, as seen in other classic posters like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Goonies, has pretty much been completely lost. Posters are almost all digitally created now, which also adds to why they all look more or less the same. Obviously digital posters were not an option in an era before computers, so back then it was more common to have an artist actually paint the actors or for a photographer to take a stylized picture to use, but the business model these days seems to be to jump into Photoshop and create something as fast as possible.

I’m not a graphic design expert by any means, but it’s undeniable that the creativity when it comes to movie poster concepts has all but vanished—for the most part. I will highlight some examples of good posters from the last ten years, but one of the reasons for the repeated creation of the floating heads posters is due to obligations in the contracts the actors sign when they appear in a film. The contract will stipulate that they must be featured on the main poster, so the easiest way to do that? Put everyone’s face on it, and depending on how big the cast is with those stipulations, that could be a lot of heads to cram in. Both Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two have many, many heads lined up pretty neatly over the desert setting of Arrakis, but both posters don’t really exemplify the unique, epic sci-fi films that they are.

Some good modern posters, in my opinion, include Oppenheimer, Barbarian, Baby Driver, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Conjuring, Prometheus, and pretty much any Wes Anderson movie. All of these posters have eye-catching imagery, most don’t use the typical blue and orange tones, and none of them are overcrowded. Many of the best modern movie posters are part of the minimalist trend, which makes use of fewer images that are intended to symbolize something important from the film, whether a character or prop or location, and might only use a few different colours. 

There’s another sub-category of posters that are actually quite good, but they’re bad in one specific way: they spoil the movie! E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is one of the best Steven Spielberg films, and a truly unique example of an alien invasion story. The most iconic moment of the entire film, aside from E.T. pointing to the sky with his glowing finger and saying “phone home” is definitely the part when E.T. levitates the bikes and the kids go for a flying bike ride through the night sky over the woods. The shot in particular of Elliot with E.T. in the basket on his bike silhouetted against the moon is cinematic perfection. It was so perfect, in fact, they put it on the poster, and spoiled what could have been a total surprise. That moment doesn’t occur until late into the film. It even eventually became part of Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment logo. When I was a kid I didn’t realize that imagery was from E.T. until years later. Other decent posters that spoil the movie include The Shawshank Redemption, Rocky IV, and Carrie (all versions).

The ideal movie poster should tease the viewer with what it’s about and what might happen in it without giving anything specific away. A couple other Spielberg movies with fantastic posters that accomplish this are Jaws and Jurassic Park. Speaking of Jurassic Park, let’s compare those posters to the Jurassic World poster. The first Jurassic Park poster pretty much just features the logo on a black background. It makes use of a great tagline, a distinct, brightly-coloured image that communicates what it’s all about without giving anything major away, and just enough credentials to hype people up. Sometimes the best ideas come in the simplest forms.

The sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, didn’t change up the poster formula too much. By the time it came out, Jurassic Park was already a major hit and had become a huge part of pop culture, so the sequel uses the same style of logo, with a simple but effective new tagline: “Something Has Survived”. I don’t remember a tagline being used heavily for Jurassic Park III, but the logo was redesigned to feature the skeleton of a Spinosaurus instead of T-rex, hinting at the new villainous dino, and the background was altered too, without getting too complicated. Instead of solid black or a jungle background, it featured the shadow of a Pteranodon cast over metallic silver. Those movies had three great posters that maintained a visual consistency and never spoiled anything from the films.  

Then, there’s Jurassic World. To be fair, the very first teaser poster was simply the old school logo, done over with a new texture. No title, nothing in the background, and little to any information. The teaser poster seemed to understand the idea that less is more, and the Jurassic brand is so powerful a title isn’t even required for people to recognize what it is. But all subsequent posters, including the main poster, caved to the belief that over-advertisement is the way to get butts in seats (and some would probably argue it worked, since it made over a billion dollars). Chris Pratt is riding on a motorcycle with raptors on either side of him (like the E.T. example, this moment in the film comes from over the halfway point), and there’s a blur effect added to make it seem that they’re moving fast. The colours are bland and the image looks overly digitized. I get that Jurassic World wanted to connect to the previous Jurassic Park movies yet also distance itself from them as its own distinct movie, but the main promotional poster just ended up looking generic and forgettable.

Like with Dune and Jurassic World and so many other blockbusters these days, the initial teaser posters are often simpler and far better, and the main posters that come along later during the marketing are the worse ones. I don’t want to just whine about how bad posters are now and not take a critical look at some of the reasons why they are not what they used to be in terms of quality and creativity. Before the internet, a movie poster went up in a movie theater or video store, and in the early days of cinema way before video stores, a poster was one of far fewer advertisement methods that existed. Now, there are physical ads on buses, billboards, and banners, plus movie trailers that play before a movie in a theater, and of course digital advertisements are a huge part of it all now, too. Old school movie posters had to look great in the lobby, but new ones have to look good on all sorts of surfaces and in all shapes and sizes. There are also way more movies coming out all the time, so there’s a much higher demand for new posters, and much more competition among them. Artists have to create a far greater quantity of ads now, and as the quantity goes up, the quality goes down.

Good movie posters still exist, and bad movie posters have always existed too (The Shaggy Dog, Wanted, Groundhog Day), but I think this trend of posters no longer being considered as important as they once were for movie marketing will continue, unfortunately. It might just be because I’m older now, but I haven’t really seen more posters for movies in the past ten years I would want on my wall than what I could count on one hand. Maybe there will be a resurgence of awesome poster designs one day, but the most iconic movie posters may just remain relics of a bygone age of cinema.