New WANTED Poster!
This is probably one of the coolest movie posters I’ve ever seen. It features a collage of scenes, including snippets of dialogue from the movie!
Click on the image for a larger version to see better… The more you look, the more you notice!
Four Talking Posters From The Spirit
When I first heard that Yahoo had talking posters from Frank Miller’s The Spirit, I thought to myself “Cool, this is the future of movie marketing”. I mean, eventually one-sheet displays will be replaced with flatscreen televisions which can easily switch in and out various movie posters. Say a screening of The Happening just gets out, the theater can load movie posters of films that people who went to see an M Night movie would also enjoy. As you leave The Dark Knight, posters from other comic book movies would light your path of exit. And this new technology would allow for animated and interactive posters.
So when I clicked over to Yahoo I was very disappointed to find four standard character posters. The talking gimmick is just a gimmick. You move your mouse over a poster and a sound clip from that character is played. Sure, it’s interaction, but pretty lamely executed. I was expecting for the characters to come to life. I was expecting their lips to move. Was I expecting too much? Check out the lameness for yourself on Yahoo. Or you could star at the four posters above and pretend they are saying the superimposed quotes. It’s probably just as good.
A-List Secrets: Why Movie Posters Are Boring
Movie posters seem to be stuck in two formats lately: the Romantic Comedy, where one character is looking away and the other gazing sweetly, or the Comedy, which calls for an exaggerated photo with a big block red typeface. WHAT’S THE DEAL? Catherine
Imagine the following answer delivered in a delightful font, maybe in Carrie Bradshaw pink with eye-catching drop shadows and a tiny version of myself jumping over the dot in every “I”: Isn’t it irresistible? Don’t you want to go out and buy The Following Answer DVD? And The Following Answer action figures and bobblehead dolls?
No? WHAT IF I ASK YOU IN ALL CAPS? All right, fine. The secrets of movie marketing, after the jump…
Whatever you happen to think of those tired poster formulasLook, it’s the Dark Knight! And he’s looking up at the cruel heavens! Again!don’t blame the designers.
“The reason you often see formulaic movie posters usually has more to do with marketing imperatives than lazy poster design,” says Nathan Corwin, an artist who goes by Scarabin and who recently designed the headily surreal one sheet for the film The Fall.
“Millions of dollars are at stake for the movie studio,” he says. “At the end of the day the goal is to get butts in seats, and those common poster formulas are great at that. They simply work.”
As for the red block letters, designers have been het up over those chunky sore thumbs for months now. Some hate them, others understand the need.
“Humans react to red,” Corwin explains. “It just looks really good on white, which is the background color most often used for comedy films.
“If you saw a poster with a green title on a black background you would probably think it was a sci-fi or monster movie.”
You mean Meet Dave isn’t a monster movie? Where was I? Oh yes. Posters.
You asked about rom-com formulae, with at least one character starting off into space. The idea is to get audiences wondering what the protagonists are thinking. Will she? Won’t she? Might she? Or, in the event of a BBC production, shan’t she perhaps deign to?
“It raises a question in the viewer’s mind, and subconsciously they know that the only way to answer it is to go see the movie,” Corwin says.
Or just hold out for a movie with a really cute font.
Oh, and be my fan on Facebook, ’kay?
International Hellboy 2 Character Posters
BadTaste.it has two new international movie posters for Hellboy II: The Golden Army. One of the character posters features Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), the other, the Angel of Death (Doug Jones). Click on the photo above to see the images slightly larger. I’m surprised that the U.S. character banners don’t feature any of the more visually interesting characters introduced in this new film, sticking to the three main leads: Hellboy, Liz and Abe Sapien. Hellboy 2 hits theaters in the States on July 11th 2008.