And talking about sure bets, here is a Comic Con poster for The Raven. Edgar Alan Poe + Comic Con = Awesome, right?
Well, as it turns out, not for me. The image is not ugly, but it just hits no emotional notes for me. My own expectations might also be getting on the way in this case. I expected something dark and with an old time vibe. This is bright and feels weirdly modern. Just doesn’t feel right for me.
Comic Con posters are always a pretty good bet. Freed from the need of appealing to a wide audience they tend to go for something stylish and unusual. Also, they generally don’t showcase the actors or shots from the movie, which cuts down on the bad photoshop.
Add to that a Soderbergh movie and the odds of getting something fun become very high. And indeed, here we have a very fun poster. Unsurprisingly, considering the director’s proclivities, the poster goes for old-fashioned instead of edgy. Works for me.
[Motion poster placed below the fold, because it’s noisy. The above is the very similar, but motionless teaser poster]
According to the press release this poster “really gives you a very FIRST glimpse at how the adaptation of the Suzanne Collin’s bestseller will be brought to life on the big screen!”. Well, that is one mighty fleeting glimpse. From that poster I can tell that the big screen adaptation will have motion, and not just static images. I think. They might have just added motion to the poster in order to make it one of those cool new motion posters.
That aside, it probably does what it is meant to do. It is a nice moving image that can be displayed around in order to remind/tell people that this is being turned into a movie, without actually showing anything about the movie. Good enough for a teaser, I guess.
I do wonder how pre-sold this movie is. Is this a Harry Potter/Twilight case where people already know the property and the most important task of the marketing is to reassure people that the work they love hasn’t been bastardized? Or is it important to sell the concept to a much wider array of people?
Either way, these posters are clearly geared towards the preexisting fan base. At this point in the campaign this is probably the right call either way. But I’m curious about how the marketing will evolve as we get closer to the release date.
It was a tradition. Every year, they would appear: poster after poster with pretty much the same background (dark bluish background, because sinister things were going on) but with a different character in each of them. Posters with the main characters, posters with the main villains, posters with whichever secondary character was slightly more prominent in that particular film. Then maybe some more posters with the main characters. All of them showcasing the characters best very very serious face because, again, sinister things were happening!
By the time the movie actually came out, they all sort of blended together in my mind. And after a few years of this, the posters of the previous years were sort of blending with the new posters also. After all, the kids weren’t really changing that fast from one year to the other anymore, and, honestly, how many posters with the same characters looking serious against a dark background, no matter how well designed individually, can you see before they all look the same?
And yet … when next year comes and we don’t get new character posters I will miss them. So used to seeing them! Like an old sweater that you can’t really bring yourself to throw out, because it was so warm at one point and you’ve gotten used to seeing it in the closet.
So, if your question was “Will The Dark Knight Rises have some awesome posters?” the answer turns out to be yes, very much so.
It must be fun designing posters for this movie. You get a bunch of iconic symbols and characters to work with. It’s the third outing in this particular series, so everybody pretty much knows the gist and you don’t need explain much to them. And the poster campaign will probably have many, many posters, which allows a little more risk taking in each of them.
Now, that doesn’t mean coming up with some great posters is easy. Coming up with great posters is never easy. But it does make it at least possible.
MoviePosterAddict 