10 Modern Movie Poster Trends That Need To Die

Marvel movies get a lot of flak for being consistent-yet-unoriginal, while DC are often derided for pushing visually bombastic films that are consistently terrible. This theme translates faithfully to posters too; Marvel’s posters are almost unanimously dull ensemble photographs, while DC’s are more eye-catching, but not necessarily better.

Like a lot of these trends, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Marvel’s (or Fox's) poster designs in isolation, but they’ve become so ubiquitous that you likely don’t focus on their finer details. That is, if they have any.

The above posters all follow the exact same formula: the central male hero stands triumphant-yet-perturbed in the middle of the scene, attacking or staring at something out of shot, whilst flanked by his comrades, as a potentially villainous force looms overhead in the background. This design was made popular by the original Star Wars movie, the poster for which followed a similar pattern.

The key differences between A New Hope’s poster and Marvel’s output are subtle, but very important. The former contains a lot of allusions to religious themes, and concisely refers to all of Star Wars’s key cinematic touchstones without seeming overdesigned. Marvel’s posters don’t tend to do anything quite so complex or interesting; they tell you who is in each movie, and that’s about it.

It’s not like Marvel Studios aren’t capable of more. Their posters depicting Ant-Man’s miniature figure stood atop various Avengers weapons were fun designs, knowing winks to the franchise as a whole that made Ant-Man stand out as a very different film in its own right.