8 More Fiendishly Clever Secrets Hidden In Famous Movie Posters
7. Split/Unbreakable
On the surface, Split just seemed like M. Night Shyamalan’s latest standalone film. The trailers were selling a horror-thriller starring a creepy James McAvoy, and there was no reason to suspect it was anything other than that.
But as it turns out, Split was a sequel to Unbreakable, Shyamalan’s grounded superhero drama starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. This revelation was completely unexpected and it sent online punters into a frenzy, but it was only after the dust began to settle that we all realised the Split/Unbreakable connection had been under our noses the whole time.
Released in 2000, Unbreakable’s poster sports an eye-catching cracked glass effect, which links in with the film’s co-protagonist, Elijah Price, a man whose bones shatter with ease. Then, in 2017, the poster for Split used this same effect, a reference to the fractured psyche of McAvoy’s Kevin Wendell Crumb.
Little did we know that another reason Split used the cracked glass effect was because it was a sequel to Unbreakable. Nobody made this connection before Split released, because... why would they? The film looked like its own thing, and there was nothing about it that even remotely hinted at an Unbreakable tie-in.
In short, we all had the wool pulled over our eyes. Someone give this marketing team a raise.