What’s depressing for me isn’t that these posters are bad – and they are so, so bad – it’s how they usually show no effort being made. I understand that movies are a business and that movie posters are a marketing element first and foremost; more than pieces of art they are created to catch the eye of potential customers and help sell them on seeing a movie. Seriously, I get that. But the way these posters are tossed off, recombining the same generic elements, color schemes and fonts reflects a complete laziness on the part of the people tasked with coming up with marketing materials.
The irony is that I think there are a couple of movie studios that are actually doing remarkable, creative work when it comes to making the films themselves and in other areas of marketing – Universal, who is behind Fast & Furious, has my deep respect for pursuing a genius like Guillermo del Toro, for instance – but the poster department always remains behind the curve. While online marketing is constantly looking at new ways to build and create buzz, the poster guy is churning this shit out so he can spend the rest of his work day doing sudoku or surfing the web or something. Maybe he’s reading this; hey poster guy, fuck you. Look at the viral sites and the exciting tie-ins that the other marketing people are working on, and try to figure out a way to make your own work more interesting.
Maybe this paradigm will change. Maybe somebody will do a survey that indicates these ugly, boring, stupid posters are starting to turn audiences away from movies. Until then, we’ll have to live with so many floating heads and cut and paste Photoshop jobs. Or maybe we just have to wait for motion posters to put this shit out of our misery.