Thursday
Dec252008
Thursday, December 25, 2008 at 9:58AM The Best Movie Posters of 2008
It's time to take a look back at 2008 in movie posters. We're unabashed
fans of movie posters here at The Big Picture, because they're probably the best thing about
the job. Maybe half the movies you see in a given year are ones you'll recommend, and maybe
half of the trailers are average or better. But movie posters are their own animal, and very
often some of the best posters are for the worst movies.
The theory on that would be that bad movies need better posters to sell them, and since
posters, trailer, and now even full movies are advertisements for something else (why do you
think Marvel is planting Avengers hints in its movies three years early?), the better
the advertisement, the more people you'll get to try your product that might have otherwise
stayed away.
As we've pointed out time and time again, If movie posters didn't work, the studios wouldn't
use them.
However, it's not just bad movies that use posters effectively; three of our top five movies
of the year are represented in our list, as well. The clear winner of 2008 is
The Dark Knight, which has the best marketing
scheme ever devised for a movie. If there's one out there better, I'd love to see it. We
selected six posters from that film's incredible catalog, and we could've picked a few
more.
These are in alphabetical order, not by their ranking, but wouldn't it be wildly
coincidental if the alphabetical list were the actual ranking? Oh, and we also limited our
list to films released in either the U.S. or the U.K. in the past 12
months.
All of these posters and more can be found at
IMP Awards.
Reader Comments (29)
Super good list. I have to say, The Dark Knight has some of the best Batman posters I've ever seen. Totally in love with the "It's all part of the plan" image. - http://iconart.ca
I'm loving all of these posters, seriously. Why didn't we in the U.S. get that awesome "Bank Job" poster? So much better than the one over here. Also, the funniest poster of the year has to go to "Zack and Miri"- I was laughing so hard when I saw that image for the first time.
The Bank Job poster is a quad, and we don't normally get those in the U.S. at all. Not for exhibition, anyway. It's all the 27" X 41" format here. Euro posters are usually more interesting, and this is another example, even though the U.S. poster for the same movie was pretty good.
At least three of the posters are brazen knock-offs of the Saul Bass style. Anyone want to take a stab at which three?
the wrestler?
1. Burn After Reading--sheer plagarism/rip off
2. Fear of the Dark
3. Bottle Shock--diluted Bass
The funniest poster of the year is that Goliath one with the dude holding the cat up.
And as a graphic designer myself, who gives a shit if people are ripping off Saul Bass. I'd rather see that then some beeble bop, over-stylized graffiti shit selling everything from tampons to tea. At least Burn After Reading has a concept behind the use.
WTF is so special about the Australia poster? Awful. Skeletor-corpse face mid-run is not at all attractive.