We all know movie posters aren’t a great source for creative inspiration. Occasionally a great poster confuses us by managing to slip through the corporate cracks, but by and large we understand them to be seldom more than floating heads and Trajan. That said, I’ve tried to cobble together a list of what are truly striking examples of how far the medium can go in it’s effort to undermine the movie it’s supposedly selling.
Honorable mention: Lady in the Water, Expelled, Rachel Getting Married.
10)
If you can make sense out of what is happening in the center of this poster, then I tip my cap to you.
You generally want to leave the movie’s flaws – in this case the inability to tell where one robot ends and another begins – off of the one-sheet.
9)
It’s hard to conjure an image that embodies more of what I dislike about the movies made today.
8 )
Looks like you’re off the hook, Vin.
7)
There is a lot happening in this poster and none of it’s good. The font alone earns it prime placement on this list.
6)
Most of Tyler Perry’s posters contribute more to culture than the movies themselves, but this one earns a place on this list because it has the audacity to compare Perry’s melodramatic brand of demographic-pandering pap to the genuinely gritty and powerful Peckinpah film Straw Dogs.
5)
Look at that face. This was the most egregious offender of the already intolerable “scary child” phase that designers and movie execs were so fond of throughout the 00’s.
4)
The floating-head philosophy truly run-rampant.
Maybe the worst example of any decade, ever.
3)
Go fuck yourself George Lucas.
2)
Just try to look at this and not laugh. It’s not even remotely convincing that these 3 actors were in the same region of the world when their photos were taken. Look at the alignment of the billing block. What? Absolutely nothing about this makes any sort of design sense.
1)
This poster is a master-class essay about the perils of having too many cooks in the kitchen – none of them qualified.
We’ve got the obligatory floating heads sandwiched on there.
We get the Departed-gun showing up. “That was popular last-year, right?”
We get the endless textures and multiply-layers.
We get a police badge just in case some moron doesn’t understand the tag-line is referring to a cop.
We get floating cast names that make no alignment sense.
I’m telling you, this baby has it all.
It’s the type of thing that is so bad it inspires hope. If whoever did this can make it in life, my ship will surely come in.
There you have it. Think I missed any? Let me know in the comments section.
