John Carter (In Mars!) Poster

I think this is my favorite John Carter poster so far. Such lovely, epic seeming scenery. And a great pulp book cover style. I’m still not convinced I will like the film, but this poster points at what I want it to be: pulp, epic, bizarre, otherworldly fun.

Which is probably not what everybody wants. And when we talk about a film like this, with a mega budget, the hope must be for something with a very broad, Pirates of the Caribbean like appeal. And I’m really not seeing any that. Not here, not in the other posters.

(Via)

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

It’s Tom Cruise… In a hoodie! Edgy! Hip! Kinda wrong seeming for his age!

Honestly, I’m not really getting what the idea was here with the wardrobe choice. Is Tom a wizard and/or a rapper in the new M:I movie? Because that would be interesting.

(Via)

Safe Poster

Considering this together with the poster for Contagion that was released a while ago we can already see the cool new trend: Posters with a weathered look that are mostly taken by the title, displayed vertically. Hott.

Honestly, I like both posters, probably because I’m just a sucker for a weathered, beaten down look (remember how much fun I had with Grindhouse posters?). But the poster for contagion strikes me as the superior effort.

First, because the the choice of visual elements and iconography matches so well with the theme of the film. It complements the message, instead of being just something cool to look at.

Second, because of it’s use of city names, a clever little way of conveying the huge scope of the disaster without relying on some epic images, which they might not have been able to get from the film itself. Again, looks good, but also tells me something about the story.

The character posters, on the other hand, left me pretty cold. The tagline is great though.

(Via)

Haywire Comic Con Poster

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.

First The Hunger Games Poster

[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.

Goodbye, Harry Potter Character Posters

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.

No Kidding Sherlock

The Sherlock Holmes posters so far have been pretty consistent visually, always sporting some fog, and blue tinge (a little more pronounced here) and backgrounds that scream period. Not earth shattering stuff, but distinctive enough to to be remembered and essentially ok for a movie which will be sold as “Robert Downey Jr. IS Sherlock Holmes!” anyway. Just get Downey out there looking like Sherlock and make a poster that isn’t completely boring to look at.

The humor is throwing me off a little bit though, especially as portrayed by the tagline. “Holmes for the Holiday”. Are we supposed to consider this to be an example of the supreme wit that will be displayed by Sherlock in the movie? My guess is that the film will have the kind of combination of drama and sometimes caustic humor that we see in, to pick the most obvious example, House, but the tagline isn’t exactly giving me confidence that they got the humor part of the formula right. And to be quite honest, Jude Law’s expression isn’t quite encouraging either.

This are probably just quirks of the poster, not very representative of the actual movie. But it would be nice if they were gone

(Via IMPAwards)

Second Daybreakers Poster

This is not exactly the poster one would expect from a vampire movie. Especially not after the first, much more genre standard, poster. But it does make sense once you take into account that the film takes place in the near future and that an important plot point is that vampires are now harvesting humans in blood farms. Which I guess is what is being depicted in here.

Considering the glut of vampire themed movies, tv series and books I imagine this was an attempt to differentiate Daybreakers by focusing more on it’s sci-fi elements. Understandable, and the image itself is pretty great.

However, it is a little hard to tell what is happening here if you didn’t already know the movie’s story. And there is a danger that comes with leaving the whole vampire theme so in the background. Danger of seeming simply like a sci-fi movie, and not as a vampire movie with sci-fi elements.

And yes, this is perhaps a little too reminiscent of the Matrix movie and their human harvesting installations.

So, yeah, I’m not sure how successful the effort was. But I appreciate what they tried to do, and the human harvest is probably the most striking element of the movie’s concept, so I’m not sure they could have done much better.

New Moon Posters

So, here we have a bunch of poster for the new Twilight movie. First, Werewolves!

Now, Vampires!

And, to finish off, we have … hmmm, more Vampires? With a human or two thrown in there? I think?

Ok, ok, I don’t actually know anything about the series, so I’m not sure what I’m talking about. And honestly, the posters aren’t exactly making me feel like changing that.

There are, to me, a couple of highlights in these. The first is the splashes of red and black in the “Vampires” poster, which help to distract from the overwhelming brown that permeates all the posters. The second is the embrace of the two main characters, which, to me, gives the only spark of emotion to be found in the three images. That aspect works, and I realize that maybe to the fans that is the most important thing.

Law Abiding Citizen Gets Another Poster

The Law Abiding Citizen poster campaign has seen several iterations of the same concept: Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx’s heads float around some stylish design that tries to make the poster energetic and hip. The design changes but the same problem remains: the posters tell us nothing about the movie or about the relation of these men. In fact, I didn’t realize they were antagonists in the film until I saw the trailer. At first I thought it was some kind of buddy cop flick.

Now, of course posters aren’t necessarily meant to explain the movie. The trailer is much better at doing that anyway. But the poster should serve as a reminder of why that film could be interesting and exciting, perhaps building on the images in the trailer. In this case it doesn’t, unless your reason to be excited about the film is simply Gerard’s and Jamie’s presence.

They could at least be looking at each other with expressions of rage. Some teeth baring would go a long way.

(Via IMPAwards)