Posterwire.com is a movie poster weblog. From images of the latest Hollywood one-sheets to vintage movie posters, this film poster weblog hopes to offer a bit of insight into film key art.
Four new teaser posters for the upcoming film V for Vendetta have been released. The movie, based on the Alan Moore comic, follows a freedom fighter known only as “V” who uses terrorist tactics to fight against a totalitarian English society. What makes the teaser posters interesting is the key art in each one-sheet embraces the style of political propaganda posters from the past — most notably Soviet.
Our favorite V for Vendetta teaser poster of the four features a silk-screen style limited color palette. The fan-boy site Ain’t-It-Cool-News labeled this poster as “Spanish & Argentian” in style. Not sure about that one — the bottom line is it’s recreating a poster style common to political propaganda posters from the past. (Reader Martin S. identifies this teaser as more Russian Leninist than the idealized Stalinist style.) AICN also identifies this Vendetta teaser as “German Expressionistic”, but it seems more inspired by the Russian Photomontage style as seen in this Russian propaganda poster. Since art history was never our strong subject, it’s hard to classify the specific style of each of these four teaser one-sheets. We invite everyone to share opinions on this in the comments section.
The poster as a piece of political propaganda has a long history across different cultures and regimes, including Chinese, American, Soviet, and Nazi.
Ang Lee’s new film, Brokeback Mountain, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, isn’t your run-of-the-mill western… or love story. Commonly referred to as the “gay cowboy movie” (although the film’s trailer and Oscar buzz imply it could rise above that label), the film could prove a tough sell to certain audiences.
For the Brokeback Mountain movie poster, the film’s producer James Schamus wanted to emulate the one-sheet for the biggest film of all time — the ultimate “chick flick” — the Titanic movie poster.
When it came time to design the poster for the film, Schamus didn’t research posters of famous Westerns for ideas. He looked at the posters of the 50 most romantic movies ever made. “If you look at our poster,” he says, “you can see traces of our inspiration, ‘Titanic’.”
In this case, “traces of our inspiration” means “traces of an exact copy”.
Comparing the two posters side-by-side, the similarities become clear — the layout of Heath Ledger’s shoulder even matches the clothing “steam iron” ship of the Titanic one-sheet.
An original movie poster for Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 science fiction film Metropolis has sold for a world record price of $690,000. A US collector bought the art deco sepia colored poster by graphic artist Heinz Schulz-Neudamm — one of only four known copies — from London’s Reel Poster Gallery.
Perhaps we spoke too soon when we posted The Scariest Movie Poster Ever for this past Halloween. How does the idea of a movie poster featuring a dog with human eyes grab you?
It seemed to grab the film ad execs over at Walt Disney Pictures, as they have just released The Shaggy Dog movie poster featuring a close-up of the as-titled sheepdog with star Tim Allen’s blue eyes (or some other person’s eyes) superimposed over the dog’s eyes.
Um… Yeah.
Just a bit creepy in our opinion. Granted, this technically represents the film remake’s plot (man turns into a dog, hijinks ensue), but our prediction is that you’ll eventually see a new piece of key art to replace this one, with less “The Island of Dr. Moreau” human/canine Photoshop cross-breeding.
After a few leaked images and an advance poster, one of the first teaser posters for the upcoming King Kong remake has finally been revealed. Universal has timed the release of this one-sheet to coincide with the latest King Kong theatrical trailer.
As for a reaction to the new King Kong teaser poster itself — it really depends on how excited and/or impressed you are by seeing a high resolution digital image of the CGI King Kong himself. It does feel a bit like “look how hard we worked” — every digital hair seems to be just so. Personally, we are hoping that the rest of the key art campaign of the film might try to re-imagine some of the original King Kong posters. (Which isn’t out of the question, since director Peter Jackson has made very clear his affection for the original film, including setting his version back in the same time period.) Of course, the 1976 King Kong poster has it’s share of fans also.
