On Friday, we wrote about a rather lacklustre bit of advertising for Justice League. Sure, it was nice to see Wonder Woman front and centre, but the actual design is pretty low effort. Surely given that the DCEU’s future could rest on the film being a hit, they might put a teeny bit more work into their marketing rather than just half-assedly cutting and pasting promo shots together. Now, as is becoming somewhat familiar, a fan has stepped in to show Warner Bros. how it’s done.
Admittedly, this reworking isn’t exactly setting the design world on fire, but it’s a hell of an improvement on what we’ve previously seen. For once, the cut-out characters actually look as if they might be standing in the same place (something neatly achieved by concealing their feet, Liefeld-style). I’m a bit on the fence about the cheesy reworking of the hero’s various logos into letters in the tagline, but it just about works here.
Take a look at it in the gallery below, along with the original, and let us know what you think.
That a fan can produce something far superior to what (presumably) handsomely paid professionals are turning out makes you wonder just what’s going on in the Warner Bros. marketing department. Marvel Studios and Disney do a little better in general, but they’re still capable of turning out some absolute rubbish. The best defense is probably that they’re working to incredibly strict briefs that govern precisely how much space each actor and character should occupy on a poster, but that doesn’t excuse the often shoddy technical work (bad cut-outs, terrible clone stamping, etc.) that you tend to see on the biggest budget releases.
Maybe the simple answer is that Warner Bros. figures anyone who wants to see the film isn’t going to be swayed one way or the other by a couple of posters, so why bother putting the effort in? But in that case, why bother spending money on marketing at all? Either way, Justice League is only a couple of weeks away now. Let’s just hope the movie is better composed than its shoddy posters.
