A Surface Analysis Of Movie Posters

a big part of a film's promotional campaign is the release of the official posters for the movie back in the day in a pre-quarantined world it was always so exciting to be walking down the halls of your local movie theater and seeing the posters on the walls of the movies that you're interested in sometimes you were even more excited to see a certain poster than the actual movie itself a poster could make or break a movie if your film has an intriguing poster to go alongside it people are more likely to be inclined to watch that movie it doesn't even matter if the poster is good or not as long as it leaves an impression on potential audiences then success should be expected how many of you watch a sonic movie or the cat's movie because you looked at those original posters and were disgusted i know i certainly did posters are arguably more accessible than actual trailers sometimes you can't be driving on the street and all of a sudden watch a full movie trailer on the billboard that's like not safe this is where posters come in handy they must be appealing to the eye especially for just a quick glance while still being able to show what the film is all about i've been thinking about this a lot lately because i just got my letterbox again which you should go follow my profile name is on the screen but i also got the link in the description because they know how lazy some of y'all are but anyway letterbox is the kind of app that requires you to make initial judgments about a movie based solely on its poster actually practically all streaming services force you to make those initial judgments based on enticing visuals alone from hbo max to disney plus to peacock or whatever other streaming services you have because there's a million at this point most people use netflix right the average netflix user is going to spend a lot of time scrolling through the recommended pages searching for the right movie to watch while scrolling most of their judgment on which movie they're going to pick is based on the poster that is presented to them netflix knows the psychology of the human mind and that is why they change their movie thumbnails on a regular basis especially for their netflix originals if a movie or show's poster was not appealing in one version hopefully another version will catch the viewer's eye that is why movie posters are so important like i said they allow potential audiences to create a quick judgment of the movie without actually having watched it it's a constant competition for attention and posters essentially function the same as thumbnails for youtube videos the bigger the impression it makes the more views it is likely to get when taking all of this information into consideration the questions start to form what makes a perfect movie poster what are the core qualities that movie posters should contain that receive the most amount of attention what design choices can generate the most amount of money i'm no visual or performing arts major i'm also not a film directing or screenwriting major i also don't major in marketing or visual media but i do love watching movies a lot and i feel like that qualifies me enough to talk about this my credibility is trash but at least i got the heart in it right so in this video i want to make it clear that i'm more than just analyzing the film posters themselves not so much the logos for the films that'll be its own video if i decide to ever make it but i don't know yet that's for later me to figure out so yeah only the posters for now no logos allowed and also this is based solely on my opinion of the posters so if you disagree with my opinion leave it in the comments and send me hate i dare you also before i start i want to give a quick shout out to my friend athena's channel on her channel we just recently worked on a project where we recreated some posters of golden globe nominees from this year so i kind of kept in theme with the poster idea i guess but yeah please go watch those two videos um because i had a lot of fun making them and some of them actually turned out pretty good like the mandalorian or the queen's gambit again please check her channel out and maybe give her a like and subscribe to boost her self-esteem because she really needs it and also because that's the nice thing to do i would know santa told me you don't have to like or subscribe to this channel though santa said i didn't deserve your appreciation so before we talk about what makes a perfect movie poster we must address what makes a bad one there are several flaws that promotional materials could have that would hinder its ability to appeal to audiences these traits could include relying too much on star power to being completely confusing and showing off none of the plot or from just being plain ugly some posters only have one of these bad qualities others may have all of them which is very very unfortunate though in this video i won't be discussing the not so obvious mistakes or strange art choices that is present in some movie posters what i mean by this is i'm gonna skip over like the small design mistakes that most people don't notice from an extra long leg to an extra long leg there's already plenty of other videos and articles about those and i'm not here to copy other people's work right i am ronald mcdonald this is probably the least qualifying factor that makes movie posters bad but i wanted to start off with this one just to piss some of you off so this category of posters relies on the use of famous actors and actresses faces and names to attract bigger audiences posters from movies like billionaire boys club with ansel elgort and taryn edgerton million-dollar arm with jon hamm or the skeleton twins with bill hader and kristen wiig that must have been a lot of filler information of examples that you probably did not care about at least i did mention the movies with a lot more big name talent but all of these are posters that rely heavily on the appeal of their famous cast rather than the actual film story or topic for some of those movies the talent's names are kinda all they have going for them be honest would you have watched the little things if denzel washington rami malik or jared leto were not a part of it now this complaint has been brought up by many moviegoers a lot lately over the past few years honestly the biggest culprit of this promotional tactic is almost every mcu film ever especially the avengers ones but i love the mcu so no one better say anything else bad about it except for the lack of post art diversity that's fine though seriously this problem of relying on big names has been present ever since early cinema history with movies such as 42nd street the philadelphia story or on the town but i guess those don't count apparently personally i don't mind when big films do this in order to gather bigger audiences i live in america a capitalist nation i understand when capitalism isn't that creative when it comes to making money but i do hate it when this capitalist nation decides to mainly promote the big names who more or less play cameo roles in movies rather than actual major roles i'm looking at you captain into the woods i know i said i was only gonna judge the poster and that's it but cats really pissed me off were heavily promoting their big names like taylor swift ian mckellen jason darillo and many of those other big celebrities but then they go around and pay robbie fairchild just in their marketing campaign monkey's trap was literally like the lead jellicle cat and he was nowhere to be found in this movie's promotional game hashtag robbie fairchild cat deserve better and don't even get me started on into the woods practically doing the exact same thing meryl streep james corden emily blunt and anna kendrick are all understandable choices to put on this poster in my opinion they're practically the four leading characters of the movie but chris pine is kind of debatable to add there but i'll let that one slide but the one i have a serious problem with is johnny depp he was barely in the movie he literally came in saying one song about how he preys on a little girl and then got cut literally no more than five minutes of screen time and he was top billing this is outrageous they also just completely skipped over the children actors of the film like leela crawford or daniel huddlestone but johnny depp's more present in the film i guess don't get me wrong i love both of these movies but they straight up use false advertising it didn't even help cats in the end because universal ended up losing money but that's what they get for leaving robbie fairchild cat out of the jellicle ball i feel pretty x-men dr sleep these are just a few examples of bad movie posters that seem so uninspired and very tame they don't really stand out and catch my attention they're not particularly appealing aesthetically they're not ugly either these posters are more or less just bland if i were walking down the hallways of a movie theater looking at the posters on the walls my eyes would just automatically skip over these when i was trying to find some ideas for this video i had to really search for these posters that fit in this category my eyes just refused really to give them any attention sometimes plain colored backgrounds could be an aesthetic i mean just look at the posters for west side story or as above so below but it doesn't mean that they will always work i feel pretty and dr sleep feel like they have a lot of unused empty space for no particular reason that doesn't necessarily match a certain aesthetic also a major no-no of these kind of posters are that they do not really show off what the movie is about i look at these and i have no clue what the story involves if i were an average watcher of the movies i would have no clue that dr sleep is at all related to the shining even after watching the movie i still don't understand why it's a spin-off of the shining i didn't like either to be honest hi welcome to wendy's this category of film posters relies on a certain movie already being a part of another previously established franchise now i know that dr sleep can be categorized into this subject as well but i already wrote that entire section and i don't want to have to rewrite what i said there and have to look for a completely other example like i said it was so hard for me to find those examples already so this case is more apparent in recent promotional film campaigns because of how every movie now is either a squeak a spin-off or a reboot or anything else of the sort hollywood found out that nostalgia is highly profitable posters like mary poppins returns toy story 2 or 2018 aladdin are guilty of this problem these new versions of the posters often do not live up to their original versions and end up falling a little flat it seems like the marketing change for these movies gave up they knew that the movie would have some sort of audience based on the name alone and the fact that it has popular ties already so the effort was not really prioritized oh well it's not like it matters that these posters aren't great the movie still made money which is the whole point of making them who are you right out of the gate posters such as the ones for frozen wendy and zodiac are in this category of bad poster design these kinds of promotional material are often misleading or unclear with the story that is being told note that all three of these examples are adapted works either of classic fairy tales or real life stories zodiac the david fincher film about the zodiac killer has a very vague poster in my opinion from the design i could see that the movie takes place in san francisco but that's really it i'm going to be completely honest before watching this movie for the first time a couple months ago i did not really know much about the zodiac killer besides all of those memes about ted cruz i wasn't alive back then how do you expect me to know something i wasn't around for my point is there had to have been other viewers like me who had no clue what zodiac was about from the name or the poster i only watched this movie because i heard jake gyllenhaal mark ruffalo and robert downey jr in it but other than that i was completely unaware of the history wendy's poster on the other hand had a concept but you could not tell from this poster that it had any link to the original peter pan story besides the name i understand that this is a different take on the original fairy tale but i feel like the movie could have been a lot more successful if the poster showed some reference to peter pan or captain hook i know that this is completely hypocritical of the last category i just made about relying too hard on adapted works but sometimes it's necessary when trying to gain an audience i remember when the trailers and posters and billboards and all of that were frozen were starting to come out in 2013 and i remember having no clue what this movie was about i don't even think they even knew what the movie was about back then either because of how many different versions they went through anyway the poster literally just shows the main characters of the movie but that's really it it looked to be another princess movie without much deviation from the disney formula but at least the final product did not seem to be the case i just wish the posters for this movie showed off more of the plot in the personalities of these characters rather than throwing olaf in every single damn piece of promotion attention for this category i'm going to put out a spoiler alert for greece and cary so if you don't want to know what happens in those movies and want to be surprised when you actually watch them just get this part i'll probably put a timestamp to the next section if i remember but if i don't remember oh well not my problem i warned you at least so now we're getting into the categories of bad movie posters that really bother me and every film should try to avoid i don't even know how these posters got passed through multiple production teams but here they are i already mentioned the two culprits of this but i'ma say it again greece and kerry what were you thinking both of these cases completely spoil the end of the movies and like their major major plot points of each film in greece it's supposed to be like a big surprise that sandy changes her look so the poster just full-on shows that because why not and then in carrie the main shot of the film is when she wins prom queen or whatever and then is doused in blood why would you show the most memorable part of the whole damn movie in the poster it completely eliminates the need for anyone to actually watch the film [Music] okay now this one this one annoys me so much the problem i'm talking about is present in movie posters such as the avengers tomb raider divergent and daredevil what do all of these posters have in common if you guessed their blatant sexual exploitation of female characters then you'd be correct i don't understand why marketing teams always force their female actresses into these awkward standing positions for promotional materials that they use in every poster is this really to attract the male gays into theater seats because this is ridiculous it also permits the mindset that women can be objectified this way i don't like that this is normalized i don't like that this is the standard for women in cinema i especially don't like that women are mainly promoted for their physical figure rather than their actual talent in the industry i know someone is going to say that also bucky and steve had to do this pose for avengers infinity war i think but all i gotta say is that those are rare male exceptions this problem is still very much enforced onto women a lot more than it is on men so here i present you with seven movie posters that are all on different levels of ugly in my opinion they're not particularly aesthetically pleasing they're more horrid to the eye mank and little woman are probably the least horrible of these cases but for some reason i don't agree with them mink has like a weird filter and art style overlaid onto everyone and little woman just seems a little boring and also relies on star power though i can't even tell that that's florence pew or that's short versus ronin the prom and jupiter ascending aren't that bad either i just don't like how they both seem so heavily edited like they have so many filters and so many graphics and settings and like they're good at kind of explaining the setting and the circumstances of the movie but they're just not visually appealing to me red riding hood for some reason i love this movie but it has a lot of the same problems as twilight where it's so driven in fantasy and is clearly a movie made for teen romance novel fans of the late 2000s and early 2010s the x-men first class posters are a little disturbing not gonna lie i feel a bit uncomfortable when i look at them like i understand completely what they were going for and how they're trying to show that they are like legacy characters and that kind of stuff but it just doesn't look right now the shocky dog poster is just i can't even look at it it's really just the eyes that are so unsettling to me they're freaking human eyes on a dog it's like cats almost but not as bad so it's it's like the mona lisa following me with her eyes wherever i go i'm scared that the shaggy dog is right behind me staring me down i can't escape the shaggy dog we've finally escaped the never ending list of flawed movie posters but that means now we could look at some good ones now after examining the mistakes we can narrow down sort of what makes a great movie poster in my opinion the four aspects that can really help a movie's promotional material is diversity showcase of a film genre and style showcase of a film's basic storyline and the overall aesthetic look to it of course some of these traits are more important than others but it's still great to exude those qualities if a poster is lacking one of those it doesn't mean that the poster is not good it just means that it excels somewhere else not everyone is talented in everything right not to be racist or anything but asian people i understand that this category may not be applicable to all movies like you're not gonna expect diversity from movies like mitsumar i tonya or all the money in the world also by the way i'm writing this script for this video before raya and the last dragon comes out but being a filipino american it is great when you finally see yourself represented on screen i am so happy that raya is being made by disney the biggest animation studio ever and they have decided to tell a story that partially takes inspiration from filipino culture very rarely do i get to see films being made about characters that look like me so this movie already means a lot and i know this is like a departure from the subject of the video movie posters but i do want to mention how great it was seeing raya using kali sticks in the trailer because i grew up learning about filipino martial arts and seeing her do what i used to do was so freaking special i'm so excited for this movie disney come hire me to promote it because i will definitely be non-stop talking about it once it comes out okay back to the original topic of diversity in movie posters but other films like the farewell or black panther and arguably pitch perfect showcase their diverse cast of characters and very appealing to the eye styles especially black panther i could definitely stare at that poster all day long and not get enough of it this poster really knows how to show off it's excellent strong all-star cast in a first of its kind blockbuster film we love to see it [Music] a good movie poster should do a good job at displaying the genre and sort of the feel of the movie overall tone should have some overlay over the poster designs that will allow the film to appeal to its target audience in my opinion horror comedy and family movies have the easiest job at accomplishing this for horror movies some great choices include the invisible man unfriended and lights out i know many of you may hate which ones i chose to represent horror but hear me out invisible man and lights out are like classic horror posters that are straight to the point and like just easy to understand you look at those posters and you're just like oh it's a horror movie unfriended was a different kind of horror movie that explored a different concept that was never seen before the movie wasn't that successful but i think the poster is so clear with the genre and the story it is trying to tell like the poster is just that good to me it's just not that pretty some comedy posters that i seem to really enjoy are bridesmaids mamma mia and palm springs i feel like my argument here might be really weak but i just really like the energy of all of these posters bridesmaids you know you can't take seriously because the cast is full of comedians and if this were a superhero movie they would not be standing that awkwardly mamma mia is just so fun and you could tell from the poster that it's not the kind of movie to take seriously and it's an overall just a really feel good movie i love it and then paul springs is also just like another feel good fun kind of movie that is reflected in the poster the bright colors and the paradise setting make it all look like a comedy also the cast is mainly full of comedians so it's kind of a given that the movie is a comedy now the children and family movies the best representation for this genre i feel are the lego movie a goofy movie and the incredibles the lego movie shows a great showcase of what the movie is actually like full of funny pop culture references lego action and a strong message about creativity and imagination if you have not watched a lego movie then you're seriously missing out no one even thought that this movie was gonna be good but look where we're at now a goofy movie's poster will show you that the movie is a fun road trip movie that does not star raven simone but it's okay because it's still great and then the incredibles is also just really good at showing how the movie is still a family movie but has a lot of action and superheroes and it's just really really nice to look at i know i mentioned the three main genres at the beginning of what i felt could be easily portrayed in movie posters but i also want to include a fourth surprise one that i think has some really good representatives drama phone posters really peaked with argo the artist and watchmen argo's poster really exudes dramatic energy and also some thriller aspects to it the artist poster shows that the movie will be a little more traditional in the sense that it is a silent film but also driven by a romantic plot and lastly watchmen's poster showcases superhero characters under a sort of dark and grim filter to show that the movie is way more serious than other kinds of superhero movies while also being very stylistic with its artistic choices because basically i auditioned with my friend bradley and we had a massive argument over chicken i think one of the most difficult things for a graphic designer to do with movie posters is to be able to tell the story or the general plot of the movie on a strictly visual platform whenever it gets accomplished well it is truly so tasty to me and i feel like everything in my life clears up that is the power of storyline movie posters they move me in way that i never even knew existed i bet once you see my choices for this category you're going to really disagree with me and finally realize that i have no credibility at all so if you didn't realize that yet i can't believe you made it this far forgive me if i butcher this but my first option for this category is force major and i really do not know how else they would have made this poster as great as it is it is not a spoiler for the movie that there's a big avalanche because it's not the climax or the resolution of the film the avalanche kind of acts as the beginning of the film so it's not really a spoiler and the poster tells you it's about a family and an avalanche wait no they they don't even get hit by the avalanche wait is that a spoiler i don't know my second option is saving mr banks this is definitively my most favorite movie of all time so of course i had to mention it somewhere on this video but this poster is so clean and so pretty to me the movie is based on a true story about the making of the original mary poppins movie and i feel like the poster does a great job at showing that general plot tom hanks is walt disney and has a shadow of mickey mouse and emma thompson's pl travers has a mary poppins shadow they're talking to each other and she looks distressed that's literally the entire plot of the entire movie big corporations stealing ideas from independent artists isn't it obvious now i know this last one may be a bit controversial but my final choice for this category is bubble boy most of you probably haven't heard of this movie but it's surely a wild one from the poster you get a clear understanding that the main character played by jake gyllenhaal is a boy who has to live in a bubble and he is in love with this girl a simple romantic plot right but then you look down at the bottom and see the road and you realize oh my goodness it's another road trip movie that does not have raven simonier but yeah the poster shows a clear basis for the plot while still being kept on a visual medium not many other movies can do this so all other movie posters are bad compared to this one sorry not sorry quoted from demi lovato i thought you were american at the end of the day most people are going to give the most attention to movie posters that are really pretty to look at posters such as 2015 cinderella the exorcist moonlight the breakfast club or any wes anderson movie ever or better yet most of the disney renaissance posters this category is pretty easy to understand i mean just look at them who wouldn't want to watch that movie i don't know there's just not really much to explain here but it's more of just like a general feeling that these are satisfying to my eyes like i mentioned earlier i'm not a marketing or a visual arts major in any way but a lot of these posters have some similarities like how the center of the poster just really grabs your attention but also the use of really nice colors that really complement the tone of the films though a minor minor minor problem i could see coming out of this category is the misleading genre it could convey mulan is probably the biggest example of this issue the poster is so beautiful to look at but it creates the idea that the movie is some big action heavy war movie which it is but also isn't at the same time the movie's still great though that's my opinion okay so i was gonna include in this video a top 10 list of my favorite movie posters ever but i don't want this to be like over an hour long so i'm just gonna make it its own separate video so if you want to see that hopefully it gets made soon i don't know i'm very unpredictable with my productivity schedule but anyway um hopefully this all makes sense i think overall the prime job a movie poster must accomplish is looking pretty once it's aesthetically pleasing to the eye then it can start implementing story elements and tonal qualities to it that help the audience gain a better feeling of what the final product is going to be like these posters have the sole job of selling a product only through a visual medium it had to accomplish a lot with very little stretch room and so i respect all those who work in the marketing industry hopefully my opinions don't offend anyone too much because what do i know i'm not a film major

Channel: Matthew Flores

Views: 888

Keywords: Film Posters, Analysis, Movie Poster Art, Movie Posters Analysis, Letterboxd, Athena Rethis, Billionaire Boys Club, Million Dollar Arm, The Skeleton Twins, The Little Things, MCU, Cats Movie, Into The Woods, Doctor Sleep, I Feel Pretty, X-Men, Mary Poppins Returns, Wendy, Zodiac, Grease, Mank, Little Women, The Prom, Jupiter Ascending, The Shaggy Dog, Raya, Unfriended, Argo, The Artist, Watchmen, Force Majure, Bubble Boy, Saving Mr. Banks, Aesthetic, Movie Poster, Matthew Flores

Id: Xo_kUhFB0aU

Length: 30min 41sec (1841 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021