We know them well. There’s the ‘lead holding a weapon while looking menacing,’ the ‘lead walking away while looking moodily over their shoulder,’ the ‘man and a woman standing back-to-back,’ the ‘soft-focus heads in clouds,’ and the always popular ‘women nagging men/rolling their eyes.’ These poster-types are so dominant that the majority of releases are variations on these themes – if not, just the same image with new faces. “But, why?” We wail, collectively. Well, because of the rise of the corporation, of course.
In the same way that big business has crept its way into the film industry – smoothing its edges and pre-packaging its product – so it has infiltrated the nature of film promotion. Trailers, TV spots and posters are all crowd-tested and massaged until everything that is distinctive about them has been eroded away, leaving just another instantly-forgettable, meaningless image. Of course, there are still exceptions to the rule, and occasionally, a film will arrive with a truly interesting poster that bucks convention – but these are simply too few and far between. The majority of promotional poster design is, these days, increasingly influenced by The Four Gs: Genre, Grading, Gender and Growth.
Genre seems to dictate a lot about the image used on a film’s poster, as if it is the most important aspect of a film – to the extent that, in modern cinema, we can tell exactly which category the movie fits into with just a passing glance. On the one hand, this may well be the idea – to effectively convey as much information about the product as quickly as possible – but it also means that, as the viewer, we don’t have to pay attention. For example, if you give this poster a cursory once-over:
You already know everything you need to know about it, without even registering who is in it, or who made it. This happens automatically – you make the assumption based on past consumer experience. You know that if you see a poster with a man and a woman back-to-back, the film will be a romantic-comedy in which the two leads are initially in conflict, but gradually warm to each other over the course of the running time – which will probably be about 20 minutes too long.
Similarly, if you happen to walk by this poster:
You make a different – but still accurate – assumption. Without needing to read the title of the film, you already know that it is a more serious romance, in which the lead couple must overcome some kind of adversity in order to be together, in a film that will include wistfulness, longing, and extensive make-out scenes. You know all this because the faces are in soft focus, and are floating in clouds.
