film / tv / substack / social media / lists / web / celeb / pajiba love / misc / about / cbr
film / tv / substack / web / celeb

dinobot.jpg

The Best New Movie Poster Trend: Things Riding Other Things

By Corey Atad | Miscellaneous | June 20, 2014 |

By Corey Atad | Miscellaneous | June 20, 2014 |


Modern movie poster design is almost uniformly awful. This has been essentially true across the board ever since posters stopped being hand-painted and shifted toward photoshopped crap. Sure, some new movie posters look great. It happens. But so many of them look like the lazy work of an uninspired graphic design team forced to abide by the marketing desires of creatively inept movie studio executives.

The latest such monstrosity is this… thing… for the upcoming Woody Allen film, Magic in the Moonlight, which premiered the other day at Moviefone:

Magic+in+the+Moonlight+high-res.jpg

Look at it. Admire it. Imagine the team of people who designed it, tested different versions of it, and approved it for the masses. The mind boggles.

The other problem with modern movie posters is the reliance on easy tropes:

moviepostertrends-backsturned-full.jpg

moviepostertrends-backtoback-full.jpg

moviepostertrends-eyes-full.jpg

These trends in movie posters are tiring. Even when one poster happens to look good and artfully done, when placed next to all the similar posters, it can’t help but look awful and derivative.

There is one new movie poster trend that I’m excited about though: things riding other things. It’s a trend I don’t think I’d seen before this year, but now that it exists I want it to continue. Forever. I want every movie poster going forward to follow this trend. All of them. Look how beautiful this stuff is:

gotg_640.jpg

Check that out! A talking raccoon with a machine gun riding a sentient tree. It’s magic.

Or how about this one:

dawn_of_apes_teaser_poster.jpg

A hyper-intelligent ape wielding a machine gun, riding a horse! I don’t need to know anything else about this new Planet of the Apes movie to know that my butt will be in that seat opening night.

And then there’s this:

fffposter-all_large.jpg

Here I was, going along with my life, minding my own business, perfectly content in the knowledge that I was never going to watch another Transformers movie ever again. Then I saw this poster. A big giant robot is riding a robot dinosaur! A ROBOT RIDING A ROBOSAURUS REX! Sure, the movie will probably be horrible, but now I’m sold. That’s it. You give me a poster with a giant robot riding a robot dinosaur and I’m there. I’m a simple man.

The best part is we haven’t even begun to exhaust the possibilities of this movie poster trend. I want to see all kinds of things riding on top of other things. Dogs riding falcons! Cars riding airplanes! Elephants riding giant ants! Endless possibilities.

And come on, if THIS was the poster for the new Woody Allen movie, wouldn’t you be more inclined to give it a shot?

marvel-in-the-moonlight.jpg

Not sure about you, but that would instantly be my most anticipated movie of the year.

You can follow Corey Atad on Twitter, or listen to his Mad Men podcast, Not Great, Pod!