New Meet The Browns Poster

(click for a large version)

Well, I guess the streak of me liking the posters for Tyler Perry’s movies had to end at some point.

This new poster for Meet the Browns takes the very subtle first teaser poster and adds a bunch of things. A big title treatment. Tyler Perry (I’m guessing) in a fat suit. And for good measure a photo of Madea, so people can be absolutely sure that this movie includes that famous character. The humor is obvious and in your face. The subtly is completely gone.

I guess the marketing team thought they were risking too much with the sparse first poster and felt they would do better with something more obviously jokey. I can understand that. But they have had so much success by using much smarter posters for the Tyler Perry movies in the past that I’m forced to wonder why they thought that now was the time to stop that approach. I mean, look at this poster for the previous Madea movie, Madea’s Family Reunion.

This was not the best poster for that film, by far. However, It does have a clean and pleasant design, and it still manages to pack a strong emotional punch AND to make it clear that this is a Madea movie, with all the kind of humor that that entails. And that, I think, has been a key to the appeal of Tyler Perry: the combination of a broad humor with a strong and frank emotional appeal.

Now, I’m very much not the audience for the Perry’s movies, so perhaps my distaste at this poster means nothing. Perhaps the people who are actually like to come out for this movie as soon as it opens will love it. But I do think that it is a clear step in a different direction when that seems unnecessary, and I think it’s a bigger risk than simply sticking with the winning formula of previous posters. Not a big risk because this is a movie that will have a big audience no matter what, but still a risk.

*Update*

Kamikaze Kamel has a post on his blog about the poster campaigns for the Madea films that basically shows that they always start off well with very beautiful and smart posters, but always end with much more uninteresting choices. Now, I still think that the last poster for Madea’s Family Reunion is miles better than this second one for Meet the Browns, but he is right that it is a lot worst than the teaser posters. So I’m revising my belief that there has been a change in the marketing strategy. Perhaps it’s the same strategy they have been using all along, just very poorly executed in this case.

New In Bruges Poster

I really liked the first poster for In Bruges, which opted for a postcard look which I thought was quite creative and fun. So I’m a little disappointed to see that the new posters go for a much more traditional. Just the main characters in the traditional v-formation. That doesn’t make it necessarily bad, but it’s just very obvious and unexciting.

When compared to the earlier effort, the new posters don’t make a very good use of the city of Bruges. The contrast between the almost toy like architecture of the city and the violent hitmen was a big part of the charm and humor of the first poster. In here the city is reduced to a very non-prominent background which is made even more inconsequential by the use of some very bleak color tones.

The colors, by the way, are a weird thing about the posters. They are very bleak and dark for a movie that is a comedy. The exception is a couple of splashes of pink, most obviously in the title but also in the ice-cream that Colin Farrell is holding for some reason. These colors remind me a lot more of London then they do of a cheery tourism oriented city in Belgium.

And that is problem. The two posters seem to indicate different tones. Cheerful X Moody, which makes me a little confused about what the actual movie will be like. But perhaps the two sets of posters will be used in different regions, making this particular problem less important.

I still don’t think these are awful posters or anything like that. They are perfectly serviceable. And perhaps the thinking was that the previous poster was too different and thus likely to alienate part of the audience, so they went with something safer. This explain some of the choices made here, but not all.

(Via Empire)

New The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Poster

So here we have the second poster for Prince Caspian, and it’s very consistent with the first poster. We have essentially the same colors and they are similarly distributed in the poster in a way that by itself would make the connection to the first poster obvious. Quite a strong unique visual identity they achieve just with that. We also have Caspian front and center once again.

What is different about this poster is that it packs a lot more in the background and around the edges, and as a whole is a lot more action oriented. Instead of Caspian with his arms crossed we have Caspian pointing his sword towards us. Instead of an army calmly marching in a corner we have a few soldiers trapped in a bridge that is being destroyed by ferocious and apparently magically controlled waves. Instead of Aslan quietly looking towards infinity we have …. well, Aslan quietly looking towards infinity. Man, nothing fazes that dude.

I like this poster for many of the same reasons that I liked the first poster. It reminds people of the first movie but also make this seem like a progression from that, especially by making it look like the action will be more intense and satisfying. And that is exactly what this film, which will already have a pretty huge built-in audience, needs. But I also feel that this poster is similar to the first to the point of making the earlier one pointless. This is not so much a different poster as it is a better version of that one.

(Via Ain’t It Cool News)

New Forbidden kingdom Character Posters

After the dreadful first poster there really wasn’t much way to go but up. But even considering that I’m still positively surprised by these posters for The Forbidden Kingdom. They give us a really good look at the main characters in the movie, and as it turns out each of them does have a very unique and memorable look. The use of a different bright color in each image helps to further differentiate between the characters. And all posters also include a very short textual description like “The Drunken Immortal” and “The Silent Monk.” These descriptions are in very small type, but the people that play close attention to the posters and notice them will get a better feel for what each character is about, so I think it’s a nice touch.

The posters also give us a a little taste of the hopefully amazing visuals and action we will see in the movie, mainly through the use of backgrounds and clothing, but also through the way the characters themselves are positioned. The poster featuring Li Bingbing in particular seems exciting to me as it does a good job of putting us in the middle of the action.

The posters are still missing some cool depictions of Jet Li and Jackie Chan together. But they are a huge improvement compared to what the campaign had been like so far.

(Via Yahoo! Movies)

New Hellboy II Character Poster – Johann Krauss

The first three character posters for Hellboy II were all about getting reacquainted with old friends. They didn’t show us anything different from what we had seen in the first Hellboy, but they were a nice way of reminding people that those characters are coming back to the big screen.

This new poster, on the other hand, starts a new phase in the poster campaign. It introduces a new character called Johann Krauss, which is described by Empire thus:

Krauss, an ally of big red, is entirely composed of psychic ectoplasmic spirit, but maintains some kind of form by remaining trapped in a suit.

Intriguing. And the character design seem to be pretty cool.

Now, this is obviously not a poster meant to broaden the audience for the film. The poster is not likely to make much sense or be very interesting to people who aren’t already following the news about Hellboy II. But the poster is a form of maintaining the excitement among people who are already interested in the movie, and perhaps a way to show them that there will be indeed incredible new things in the film that will make it worth seeing.

International Get Smart Posters

This happens every one in a while. A poster comes out for a film and I don’t like it, so I do a post criticizing the poster, often harshly. Then another poster for the movie comes out that is so awful, I’m forced to go back on my word and say that the first poster wasn’t so bad after all. So, although I believe that the first poster for Get Smart had some pretty obvious flaws, I still have to admit that it is miles better than these new international posters.

There is much to hate about these new posters. The weird light blue background for one. The fake metallic, fake 3d letters for another. But the biggest offender has to be the awful photoshop job they did with Steve Carell’s head. It look tiny compared to the rest of him, and even if you overlook that it still seems like it was pasted into a body it didn’t belong to. Which is likely true, and happens a lot in posters, but it’s not supposed to look this obvious.

And they didn’t even get Carell’s expression right. Steve has a very distinctive “trying very hard to look serious” face which is actually impossible to take seriously. It’s a trademark, and it’s constantly hilarious. And this is not it. This is just some bizarre actually serious, not funny at all face.

And the body, oh how strange the body position looks.

The Hathaway poster is a little better, but she still looks odd floating around in the blue tube, holding her gun, with her hair flowing to the left because apparently the tube is windy. This is also the same picture of Anne they used in the previous poster, but that is a very minor problem, all things considered.

Just very, very bad.

(Via IMPAwards)

</c

My Blueberry Nights Poster

I ended up never writing about the first My Blueberry Nights poster. I can’t quite remember why. I certainly meant too.

Anyway, the film, which was first shown last years at Cannes, is finally going to open on the U.K. in February, and that means we get a nice Quad poster for it. It maintains essentially the same style of the previous poster, which you can see below, but it makes good use of its different proportions in order to showcase all the main actors in the stellar cast.

I like seeing all the actors up there, and I like that it makes clear that this is a big ensemble piece. But I also miss the kiss, and the connection between these characters that it represents. The previous poster was, because of that interaction, more romantic, and more luscious.

So each poster has it’s strengths. The good thing is, you don’t have to choose one. Both posters can coexist, and in this case I think they complement each other.

And the elements that they both share, such as the neon lights, are good. They give the images an unreal, almost dream like look which is very recognizable, and consistent with what we see in the trailer.

(Via Empire)

Trajan is the Movie Font

I’ve been meaning to post this video for a while now. Watch it and see if you can stop yourself from muttering “Trajan again” under your breath all the time.

Found via the great Burbanked.

Since We Are Talking About Horror …

Ok, so here are a couple of horror movie posters that I’m not too fond of.

First, the poster for the remake of Prom Night, which goes for the classic “girl in distress close-up.” Now, you can do some interesting posters with that basic concept, but this is not one of them. For starters, by cutting off most of the face and leaving us with just the mouth and nose visible this becomes a generic girl face unattached to any larger context. It’s hard to feel too bad for a generic girl face.

The cold blue and black colors also take away from the intensity of the image. This might be a fine color scheme in something more subtle, that hinted at coming horrors, but not here. The second poster for The Eye is somewhat like that, and although I wasn’t a big fan of the black and blue color scheme in that case it was still a better match than it is here.

And finally, the only reference to a prom we have is the tiara. I understand the fascination that some people might have with seeing the prom queen get slashed, but it shouldn’t have been too hard to come with some more subtle and at the same time more upsetting imagery that gets across the idea of a bloody prom more effectively.

The second poster is for Possession. The basic story of the movie revolves around a man and his brother falling into comas after a car accident. Eventually one of the men wakes up, but he claims to actually be his brother who is still in a coma. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays the wife of the man still in a coma.

The designers managed to represent the idea of a different soul/mind inhabiting a certain body by showing a man standing up and projecting two shadows. It’s a clever little image and if the poster had focused on it perhaps it would have resulted in an effective one-sheet. But no, they had to have the big floating semi-transparent head of Sarah Michelle Gellar in it too. Add to that the odd gray coloring of the background and suddenly you have a cheap and generic looking poster.

Just as a curiosity, Possession is based on a South Korean movie called Addicted. Below you can see the poster for that movie.

(Via IMPAwards and WorstPreviews)

The Horrors of 2007

Although there were a fair number of horror movies released during 2007, there was a definite lack of creative and economic success. Still, there were a few posters worth remembering.

Back to the Grindhouse

Looming large over all other 07 horror movies was Grindhouse, the Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration that became a favorite topic of Internet conversation. Unfortunately all that virtual ink wasn’t enough to get people to go out and see the movie.

The Grindhouse posters were many people’s favorite posters of the year. Like I mentioned on my post highlighting 10 posters from actual grindhouse movies, they don’t really look like genuine grindhouse posters. They do incorporate some of the conventions, and go for a worn down look, but they are obviously much less cheap looking then any actual Grindhouse poster ever was.

Despite that lack of authenticity, or perhaps because of it, I really loved these posters. But I guess they do work better as pieces of art than as marketing tools.

Blood Red Night Forever

The posters for 30 Days of Night also managed to make it into quite a few horror fans’ top posters list. They are interesting to look at and do have a very unique, very recognizable visual identity. But I still think they could have done something more connected to the movie’s premise.

Much Blood, Much Gore

Another year, another SAW, another bloody SAW poster. And despite the fact that I no longer think these posters are effective as they used to be, the SAW brand was still strong enough to make SAW IV one of the few economic highlights of last years’ crop of horror movie.

However, Hostel 2 went much farther with it’s posters than the people behind the SAW franchise were willing to go and ended up getting pie on it’s face. The dismal boxoffice returns of Hostel 2 proved that simply being the most graphic and gory kid in town is not enough to make people actually want to see the movie.

Much Ado About Nothing

The captivity posters ended up generating a lot of controversy, due to the use of non MPAA billboards in public places. However the controversy never translated into an audience interested in seeing the movie.

From Enticing to Trash

The Invasion deserves a mention for starting with a good teaser poster and then following that with what was one of the very worst posters for any major motion picture from last year.

Korea Represents

In 2007 we had two Korean monster movies opening stateside. And both D-Wars and The Host brought with then some excellent posters.

These posters made me curious, so I decided to seek out a few other Korean horror movie posters from 2007. To my delight there were a few very amusing ones.

Having Some Fun With It

Sorely lacking in most of this years Horror movie posters is a sense of humor. One shining exception was this poster of teeth, which found a a comedic way to deal with the movie’s disturbing premise. Of course, now that they are positioning the film for actual distribution another poster has surfaced which takes itself much more seriously.

Another good one is this poster for Severance, which makes the most out of the title’s pun.

Japan Comes Through

The posters for Aliens Vs. Predator 2 were generally not bad, but they were a bit unexciting and obvious. But once again Japan managed to bring us some much needed weirdness.

Hazard Suits are in Again

Two different film posters featuring prominently hazard suits? What are the odds!

I do think the one for 28 Weeks Later looks much better tough.

Looking Forward

There were at least a couple of posters released last year for films that will open in 08 that really caught my attention. One is the poster for The Eye above, which manages to be both very creepy and very original.

Another one is the first poster for Funny Games. Different, bold and still the most disturbing poster I have seen all year.

A Little History

I just have to mention this poster for Dead Silence, because it was the subject of the very first post in this blog. Ah, the memories.