10 Modern Movie Poster Trends That Need To Die

There are a lot of well-researched, well-written articles about why exactly modern blockbusters are overwhelmingly blue and orange in hue, but the short answer is that most movies are about human beings, whose skin tones generally range from pale pink to dark brown. Orange sits in the middle of this spectrum, with blue acting as a contrasting/complimentary colour. So when editors are colour grading movies, they tend to highlight orange and blue for the sake of contrast.

Within moving images, this trend of making films look like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange wrapper is actually hard to spot, unless you take great care to compare stills and really scrutinise footage. But when it comes to posters - which tend to be more saturated and brightly coloured - it becomes a lot more noticeable.

Such posters tend to range from stylistically apropos (Dunkirk, Tron Legacy) to vomit-inducing (GI Joe, Terminator Genisys, Gods of Egypt). If a movie’s blueness can be attributed to a desire to contrast against skin colour, then a poster’s even brighter blueness comes down to the presence of explosions and fire. That’s why this trend skews more towards action and sci-fi films, which often rely on explosions in order to tell a story.