I started to write ought the first draft of my essay, which I did so without all of my references yet and no real plan. I just wanted to see the direction I could take the essay, and to see if the research and ideas for content I had at the time were enough. After getting some feedback on it, I realised that I was going about the essay wrong; I was trying to fit everything in when is should really just be focusing on a handful of examples that respond to mu question. Also in this draft essay, I really wasn’t talking about actually what constitutes a good movie poster enough, more so talking about Hollywood marketing and consumerism with blockbuster films, which while important and interesting as a bit of context, should not be gone into in so much depth. From here I need to research some more books, and find a handful which go more in depth into what makes a good poster/movie poster. I am then going to use 4 or 5 film posters to use as specific case studies. I will formulate a plan for my essay as well to make sure it is structured correctly.
There is a general consensus of late, indicating the modern movie poster has declined in quality in comparison to some of its more iconic predecessors. It’s true that as the film industry has grown to become a trillion dollar industry, contributing greatly to the world economy, more and more films are being produced and sadly this means a lot of them are simply made to churn out more cash, with their movie posters functioning as repetitive marketing devices. In this era of modern cinema and design, people long for the originality and human touch of the classic film poster; framed posters of films like Scarface and Pulp Fiction line the walls of the bedrooms of students and young adults who weren’t even alive when these films were released. Fundamentally, are the formulaic and 'soulless’ Hollywood marketing strategies to blame for this decline or are people just filled with a misplaced sense of nostalgia? The most important question is, what actually constitutes a good movie poster? Can this be examined effectively or is it purely subjective?
When considering the modern day movie poster, one must contemplate the degree to which they are calculated and used as a marketing tool, Barackman (2013) writes - “Although movie studios typically drop $100,000 per poster, they often fall prey to formulas and “I’ll have what she’s having” designs.”. In any creative field, the avoidance of repetition is common and strived towards, designers want to create original and new work each time, however for these big blockbuster movies, certain colours, grid systems, visual devices and typography are used to market specific genres to a specific target audience, and when they work, studios aren’t afraid to keep on using them. For example, A surprisingly large amount of modern film posters use the colour combination of orange and blue; These two colours are directly opposite each other on the colour wheel, making for a dynamic and exciting contrast, for this reason the two colours are used an incredible amount in posters for action, thriller and fantasy movies. Other visual devices which have proved successful, meaning the studios have subsequently regurgitated them include; The man and woman standing back to back against a white background for a romantic comedy movie, a gritty dark blue hue for an action/thriller movie and the classic ‘floating heads’ above a beach for a romantic movie.
This is not to say that there are no good movie posters these days, because there are a lot of amazing posters, Perhaps the reason that the film industry seems so oversaturated with these vastly edited formulaic blockbuster posters is that these are the movies which have the biggest budget for advertising and are generally the most popular. Basically the more money they have riding on it, the less risk they want to take in elements such as marketing. When examining the posters of movies which are perhaps a touch more avant - garde; documentaries or independent films, it’s a totally different story. This can be seen in art director Adrian Curry’s Creative Review article ‘The Best Film Posters of 2017’. Each poster is not only a departure from the modern blockbuster movie poster but also they are entirely different from each other, providing refreshing variation. Take for example film poster designer Midnight Marauder’s poster for Eugene Jarecki’s documentary ‘Promised Land’, which Curry (2017) describes as having ‘beautiful high-contrast images, surreal juxtapositions, flat planes of colour and perfect type’. And Midnight Marauder’s film poster prowess does not stop there; his portfolio is ripe with fantastically designed posters, for example, his poster for Amy Scott’s ‘Hal’ utilises a beautiful balance between very minimal type and imagery, a serene amount of white space and a refined application of colour - a superb piece of design and a far cry from the blockbuster movie poster sensibility of throwing everything they can onto one poster.
As previously stated, a lot of these more creative and intriguing designs come from movies which aren’t from massively popular studios or franchises and are instead more of an artistic endeavour. For movies like this, where generating as much cash as possible is not the main priority, the director and producers gain more control and ‘creative autonomy’ over elements such as the poster. This means that they don’t have to, for example, squash in all 8 characters of a movie with their scale on the poster being proportional to their role in the film, because they don’t have to try and use the film’s star power as a promotional attention grabbing tool.
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