C’mon Hollywood #134

… I’m sick of these lame posters!
by Sturdy

I’ve been an avid movie poster collector for about 15 years now and although I love original movie posters, I have to admit I’ve become disappointed with them for quite a while now. Posters should be cool, artistic representations of the movie, instead, most of them look like generic Photoshop hack jobs. It’s time that Hollywood use some creativity in their posters.

Even robots get the floating head treatment.

It seems the most common type of poster these days is the floating head poster. This the one that has two or three giant heads with a minor picture in the background. You can find these just about everywhere nowadays, especially if a movie is really trying to sell their stars and not their story. Heck, even TRANSFORMERS used this style and they were featuring Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Megatron. These are almost always generic in nature and sometimes you can even tell the pictures used are old. In an extreme example, the pictures used for PIRATES OF THE CARRIBBEAN 2 were the same exact pictures they used in the first one. That’s pretty much the definition of lazy.

Now where have I seen those pictures of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley before?

Another common type of poster is to have a giant picture of the main star. DIE HARD 4 used this and why not? People were going to the theater to see Bruce, you might as well give them a glimpse of the man while promoting the film. I understand the need to promote your big star, but can’t we do better? The Bourne films did the same thing, all of which were minor modifications of their predecessor. The big summer sequels should give you the most room to play with the poster since the name alone is going to draw the fans. The poster should be a creative medium to express what the film is about, not another generic way of advertising the movie.

Bruce and DIE HARD, what else do you need?

Despite the huge number of lame posters, there are a couple of posters that pop up that are actually kind of cool. I really like the posters for the Pixar films. They’re nothing fancy, but they get your attention and sometimes make you laugh before you even see the movie. I also have to say I like most of the posters for the Spider-man movies. Although they usually have way too many versions, most of what they have is pretty cool.

It’s older, but this is probably my favorite poster. What’s yours?

There are thousands of out-of-work photographers out there that would kill for the chance to design a poster. So let them. Movie posters should make someone want to see the movie, or at the very least learn more about it. Most of today’s posters are so generic in nature that they barely even get noticed. So c’mon Hollywood, get creative with your posters and give fans something they want to hang on their walls.