Why Modern Movie Posters SUCK
Movie posters for big blockbusters tend to repeat the same tired patterns. What's gone wrong?
Movies have always been an experience beyond the screen. They leave something behind each time the credits roll - thoughts and feelings to take away as we exit their space and fall back to reality. It's the culmination of a mini odyssey, in that way - the ritual of leaving our homes, entering a curated dimension and being taken to a place that is larger than life. But it's not just film that orchestrates that sense of transition; there's a wider environment at play, a key component of which accompanies us from the moment we step into the cinema to the comedown that invariably comes next - the movie poster.
Movie posters - like cinema itself - are inherently larger than life, a window to play with perception, scale, and the abstract and which connote not only the scale of the medium but also the feel of a given piece of cinema. Done well, and they become more than just an obligation of marketing, emerging instead as a totemic part of a film's contextual narrative. Martin Scorsese likened this relationship to the idea of "chasing a phantom", as audiences seek to recapture and carry that cinematic vibe with them, but as Letterboxd UK Editor Ella Kemp surmises in her piece, "One-Sheet Wonders: the art, psychology and people behind film posters", it's also an accurate description for the process of crafting a movie poster too.
The works of Drew Struzan, John Alvin, Bill Gold, and Saul Bass - to name just a few of the seminal poster artists who've left an imprint on the medium over the last 100 years - are inextricably linked to their cinematic subjects. In more recent history, we can also look to the likes of photographers like Peter Tangen, whose work across the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy remains an iconic touchstone of 2000s popular culture. If there is a phantom to chase, then by Scooby-Doo, they got it.
Flash forward 20 years, however, and the movie poster landscape would appear decidedly less interesting. There is the occasional banger - such as the recent big sheets for the Marion Cotillard-starring The Ice Tower - but for the most part, posters for big movie blockbusters tend to feature the same, stale, uninspiring tropes: goopy digital imagery, intrusive airbrushing, and head collages. Lots and lots of head collages. These "floating head" posters are a particular favourite of tentpole franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars, with both coming in for criticism for reverting to the same visual tropes (a criticism that stings especially for the latter, given its position in the lineage of artists Roger Kastel and the aforementioned and now dearly departed Struzan).
The dearth of vibrancy in the movie poster space - at least as far as blockbusters are concerned - is down to a myriad of factors, ranging from contractual obligations to the nature of marketing in the age of smartphones, social media, and a world where cinema attendances are more precarious than they once were. The result of these cumulative stresses, sadly, has led to less expressive works of poster art - pieces designed primarily to out-compete the algorithm and wrangle our eyes for even a fleeting moment while scrolling through social media. Kernels of beauty remain within that prism, but the space is more constricted and uncomfortable, with the window to create a poster that is expressionistic, evocative and individual seemingly narrower than ever before.
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