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.
One of our favorite weblogs, Speak Up, has an article analyzing The Color of Top Grossing Movies in movie posters. They did this by pulling a color scheme of movie posters representing the top 5 grossing movies in each MPAA rating category. This came about because author Armin Vit wondered if NC-17 rated film posters would be “dark and provocative” as a visual baseline.
Speak Up’s experiment highlights a few basics in one-sheet color schemes: Comedies feature brighter colors (and rely heavily on white backgrounds), whereas other film genres skew darker (and more likely to use a black background). You could further categorize film types by color: Science fiction films tend to use cool tones (blues, greens). Action films use warm tones (reds, yellows). Horror films use earth tones (oranges, browns). Animated films use the most varied color combinations, reflecting the colors of the animation itself. Of course, there are countless exceptions to these genre by color examples.
Finding hidden messages and then labeling it as subliminal advertising has a long history in our culture. Hidden images and messages have also appeared in movie posters (some being obvious and not-so-obvious) as well.
Apparently the staff of a Galaxy movie theatre (or someone with Photoshop) took it upon themselves to stage three teaser posters in just the right order (for Superman Returns, Eragon, and X-Men: The Last Stand) in this hidden message vein. (via 13gb.com)
