Ammon Gilbert,
Jun 17, 2009
If done correctly, movie posters can entice you to see a movie you know nothing about. With the right combination of design and style, a poster can be more than just a piece of marketing -- it can be a piece of art you want to display in your living room. However, a bad movie poster invokes the exact opposite response. When you see one, you automatically assume the movie must be bad. It makes you want to run away screaming, and if it's really bad, it'll make you cringe with nails-on-the-chalkboard intensity. The recent poster for The Proposal invoked such a feeling, which got us thinking about some of the other worst movie posters in recent memory. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Righteous Kill (2008):
Here's a movie with two of the biggest names in Hollywood finally starring onscreen together. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are like a match made in heaven; their pairing should have made for an easy sell and an awesome movie. Then they came out with this poster and our hopes and dreams of awesomeness flew out the window. The studio snapped a picture of the duo looking quasi-badass but mostly looking bored, threw in a landscape shot of a city -- because that's important -- and topped it off with a transparent image of a badge and a gun. There's nothing about this poster that makes me want to see this movie, and I wasn't the only one.
Changeling (2008):
The "A Clint Eastwood Film" is too small and illegible, and Angelina Jolie's giant head appears to be sizing up the tiny boy in the corner for a snack, Godzilla-style. Does she want to eat this kid, pop off his head and drink down his bodily fluids? I have no idea. Plus, there's a lot of white space going on here. Your eyes are naturally drawn to the middle, yet here the middle is blank. Then you veer to the left, and it's a monster-sized Jolie head. And this was nominated for a few Academy Awards? Yikes.
Jingle All the Way (1996): In the '80s, Arnold Schwarzenegger comedies were actually funny. In the '90s, they were scary. Jingle All the Way was twice as scary because it was a comedy and a holiday movie wrapped into one. This poster sums up the movie fairly well, but since it's a bad movie that makes for a bad poster. Nothing worse than taking screen captures from the final film, blurring out all but Sinbad from the crowd, replacing the background with a ton of white, and wrapping the whole thing with Christmas lights. And not even a single tagline to allude to what this movie is about.
Urban Legend (1998): Floating head posters are my all-time biggest pet peeve. I'm calling out Urban Legend because it's a good example why floating head posters suck. However, it's not the only one out there, and it won't be the last either. There are six heads floating around an eye, divided by broken glass and text from newspaper clippings. Some heads are looking scared in one direction, some are looking directly at the camera, and others are looking dazed and confused. The tagline works well for the movie, but the overall image doesn't. What do an eye and a broken glass have to do with urban legends? But most importantly, what's up with all those floating heads? Slasher movies were a big contributor to the floating head phenomena, but it dipped into genres across the board after awhile. Please make it stop.
Next (2007): This poster is a combination of what's wrong with all of the above. There's the unnecessary city landscape at the bottom of the poster (Righteous Kill), Nicolas Cage's giant head in contrast to Julianne Moore and Jessica Biel (Changeling), screen captures of Moore and Biel taken directly from the movie (Jingle All the Way), and everyone is staring off to the side with a little too much intensity and concentration (Urban Legend). I'm not gonna say this is the worse poster of all time, but I will say it's downright awful. Throw in an explosion, Photoshop a mixture of blacks, blues, and whites, and give everyone equal billing -- even though it's obvious that Nic Cage, thanks to his ginormous head, is the lead star -- and you have yourself one train wreck of a movie poster.
