This summer, Donald_Petersen is looking for art… in ALL the wrong places! Rated PG13.
You’re right to want the best out of everything, to want every poster to be an original and arresting piece of artwork in its own right. Some of the Polish posters you refer to are stunning (and many have a tenuous connection to the film they are representing). Realistically, though, we’re looking at the paunch of the bell curve here, not its highs and lows.
The problem brenbart refers to below, of being mis-sold on a movie’s tone due to the marketing, shows how effective this iconography is (and how carefully it should be used). ‘John Cater’ left this beaten path, slightly, in its promotional imagery (though it can hardly be said that what was used instead was an artistic triumph), and no-one turned up, with much confusion sited over what the film was actually about. Would there have been more bums on seats if the film’s obvious genre conventions had been more clearly communicated in its marketing?
This is bullshit. Apparently 10 similar posters in the entire history of film constitutes a “cliche”. Both yellow backgrounds and blue backgrounds are cliche. What about the rest of the rainbow, guys? I look forward to the followup post where red, orange, green, purple, black, gray, and white are also found to be cliches.
These are kind of like the modern-day version of the “monster holding an unconscious woman” in old horror movie posters. Didn’t matter if the scene was even in the movie or not, if it had a monster (or even a protagonist who looked enough like a monster for poster purposes) then it had to be carrying an unconscious woman in its arms. Preferably one showing some leg.
As far as John Carter goes, there were a number of problems with that film’s marketing, beginning with the choice of title itself. Right or wrong, it’s predictable that Disney wasn’t about to go with A Princess of Mars (the title of the book the movie was based upon), simply because “Disney” coupled with “Princess” means a vastly different market than that to which this movie was aimed. Still, considering the movie was about a character who was incredibly popular in the first half of the twentieth century but dipped below the horizon of the wider public consciousness around the time I was born, Disney might at least have gone with the title John Carter of Mars to let people know that this was a science fiction movie here, and not a snoozy biopic about a heretofore unknown cousin of the 39th President. It did twice the box office of the similarly-forgettably-titled Larry Crowne, and that one starred Tom Hanks.
But there’s already been an entire book written about the failure of that movie’s marketing (John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood by Michael D. Sellers) and it came down to more than just the poster. Really, Disney didn’t know how to handle that property at all, which is strange since they’ve usually got it down to such a science.
But the studios are gonna do what they’re gonna do. The movies will stay derivative and familiar and unoriginal as long as that stays profitable, and the posters will too. I just don’t find their shorthand and messaging interesting. I don’t expect every poster to be a self-contained, brilliant objet d’art, but it sure is nice on those occasions when someone does one right. And one never knows when it’ll happen. My wife inherited a sizable collection of vintage one-sheets and lobby cards from her father, and many are up on the walls in our home and in my office. One of my favorites is for a largely-forgotten John Ford Western entitled Two Rode Together, starring Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark (weirdly still not available on Region 1 DVD), and a poor reproduction of which can be found here. We also have a Polish poster for Johnny Got His Gun which is striking and perfectly evocative of the movie’s content. But then there’s Citizen Kane. As wonderful as the movie is, the one-sheet we have for it is pretty ugly, and kinda pathetic how it desperately claims, “It’s Terrific!” in case you had your doubts.
I just find it disheartening when too many posters rely upon the same limited vocabulary of shorthand tropes and images to try and sell a ticket. Laziness on the part of the artists (or, to be fair, the heads of the marketing departments who sign off on the campaigns) leads directly to laziness on the part of the viewers, lowering our expectations and effectively tempting us to say, “Look, Honey! Next week opens that movie wherein Hanks/Cruise/Pitt faces off against Jolie/Travolta/Giamatti where all those things blow up! You know, the one with Plot #13A, with the Spielbergian heart and the early-Shyamalan twist and the love history with whatshername? That looks like a perfectly acceptable waste of two hours.”
You’re right, John Carter is really a special case, and I was maybe heading a bit off topic bringing it in.
I do wish we lived in some kind of alternate reality where all movie posters were illustrated by hand still, as in the examples you linked to. That ‘Two Rode Together’ poster is indeed great, and I have to say I find the ‘Citizen Kane’ poster weirdly compelling, what with it’s 20-foot tall ginormo-Kane…
