10 Modern Movie Poster Trends That Need To Die
Sometimes, you have to judge a book by its cover.
As you pass through the corridors of your local cinema, on the way to the next Oscar-tipped picture or big-budget blockbuster, it’s likely that you pause for a while to peruse nearby posters. Before you seek out trailers or exchange any money, it is here that most of your viewing decisions are made, often sub-consciously, without you even realising.
Such is the importance of a good movie poster, the first line of defence against a cinemagoer’s cynicism, stinginess, and/or better judgement. For years, even decades now, the walls of our buildings and the tops of our buses have been plastered with dreary, visually unoriginal posters, regardless of the quality of the film they’re intended to sell us on.
This is because far too many poster designs follow tired but reliable formulas, and hedge their bets with the familiar rather than attempt to try something new.
In this way, they serve as a fairly astute metaphor for the film industry as a whole, a circus of tropes and over-designed nonsense bundled together in an attempt to draw people’s attention. Some of these tropes have been around for as long as cinema itself, and have become well known to the general public, while others are recent phenomena, and have managed to slip under our radars unnoticed.
10. There's Something (Spooky) In My Eye
Our eyes are arguably the most revealing parts of our faces. You could remove a character’s mouth, nose and ears from a shot, and we’d still be able to understand and empathise with whatever emotion they are feeling.
That’s why a common tactic for horror directors is to include a lot of very tight, jarring extreme close-ups on eyes, in order to create a sense of claustrophobia and anxiety. It’s certainly effective, but it’s also overdone, particularly when it comes to movie marketing.
Regularly seen on posters for lower budget, often foreign horror movies, a huge, glaring eyeball is a pretty easy way to tell your audience: “You are about to watch a scary film.” But there’s no design flair or inventiveness on show here – such posters feel like the sort of thing you could cobble together cheaply and efficiently for a media studies school project.
Movies like ‘The Eye’ get a free pass (you could hardly make the poster a big nose), and while the poster designs for both Candyman and Would You Rather? do a good job of making us flinch through the addition of stingers and razor blades, most posters of this kind are completely uninspired.
Avatar is the most puzzling example though. James Cameron’s 3-D extravaganza may be the highest grossing movie of all time, but it’s fair to say it didn’t achieve this based on such a humdrum poster design.