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.
FirstShowing.net is giving away two different versions of the new James Bond Casino Royale movie posters as part of their Poster Madness Contest Series of movie poster giveaways. Enter the contest by Saturday, November 25th for a chance to win a copy of the Casino Royale teaser poster or the Casino Royale final domestic one-sheet. (via IMPAwards.com)
Just wanted to remind everyone that for a limited time MovieGoods.com is having a sale of authentic theater movie poster one-sheets for only $4.99. That’s an incredible price for original double-sided movie posters (not the cheaper single-sided consumer reprints). So if you would like to own the popular Batman Begins one-sheet or the infamous banned Saw 2 teaser poster for only $4.99 each, here is your chance.
We often cite Wikipedia.org in our postings because it’s such a great online resource of information on most any subject. For those unfamiliar with the site, Wikipedia is known as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. From the Wikipedia.org About page:
Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has rapidly grown into the largest reference website on the Internet. The content of Wikipedia is free, written collaboratively by people from all around the world. This website is a wiki, which means that anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia, simply by clicking the edit this page link (with a few minor exceptions, such as protected articles and the main page).
For being such a far reaching reference on so many subjects, it’s a bit surprising that Wikiepdia’s entry about the term movie poster seems to be lacking. Since the power of Wikipedia is that it is collaborative, we were hoping our appeal to any Wikipedia editors (or would-be contributors) who are reading this site might be able to help make the movie poster article better and more informative. The current Wikipedia discussion about the article seems to be whether the entry only serves film poster collectors and dealers.
An example of what could help expand the article about movie posters: Is the term for a standard size theatrical movie poster spelled one sheet, one-sheet, onesheet, or 1 sheet? (We use different spellings for the term, but we believe the proper spelling is “one sheet“. But is this how Thomas Edison spelled “one sheet”?)
If you’d like to help edit the movie poster (or any other Wiki) article, you can read Wikipedia’s Tutorial to learn more about the editing process.
Matthew Baldwin of the weblog Defective Yeti was a guest on the July 11th episode of the KUOW (the Seattle NPR affiliate) radio program The Works, talking about movie related weblogs. (You can listen to the show via an MP3 stream or Podcast.).
Matthew was kind enough to mention Posterwire.com as one of his favorite movie weblogs, which we certainly appreciate. We would also like to echo his pick of GreenCine Daily, a great film related weblog.
The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog has a fantastic collection of images of vintage Mexican Lobby Cards from “the golden age of Mexican Cinema”. The online selection of lobby cards from science fiction, horror, and other genre films highlight an ongoing Los Angeles area exhibit of artwork from Mexican cinema. (via Boing Boing)
The IMP Awards film poster site has quite a few online movie poster jigsaw puzzles that you might find entertaining. The film poster puzzle for Being John Malkovich is downright evil.
Tartan Films is running a contest on MySpace (the uber social networking web site) to choose the one-sheet for the U.S. domestic release of the Korean film Lady Vengeance (originally titled Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). MySpace users can cast their vote for their favorite Vengeance poster (among a listing of 7 proposed one-sheets) by leaving a comment on the contest page.
In our opinion, the best Lady Vengeance poster would have to be the original foreign Sympathy for Lady Vengeance teaser poster, which isn’t up for contention in the online MySpace “Movie Poster Thunderdome”.
We won’t rehash our feelings about movie poster contests, but we do believe you’ll be seeing more of this “online focus group for film advertising” trend in the future. After all, why should the studios recruit teenagers and out-of-work actors found during a weekday visit to the Media City Center mall in Burbank California to fill out comment cards/surveys on movie poster concepts when they can do it online so much more efficiently?
The annual 2006 Weblog Awards (the “Bloggies”) have opened up for blog nominations by the public. Since every other weblog likes to mention this fact, we thought we’d beg for vote nominations too. ;) So if you’ve enjoyed all the pithy commentary about gay cowboys, mentions of “Big Heads Floating the Sky”, high resolution movie poster images, and other film ad industry information, we’d certainly appreciate nominations for Posterwire.com in any of the Weblog Awards categories. (We’d probably be most appropriate in the Best Topical Weblog and Best New Weblog categories.) Regardless of how you feel about our vote whoring, stop by the awards site to vote for your favorite weblogs in a wide range of categories.
IMP asked their readers to track down all of the movie posters that used an image of a character flashing two fingers to helpfully denote the fact that the film is a sequel. Not surprisingly, a popular choice features Cameron Diaz in latex (or at least her body double) flashing the “duex” sign from behind.
Tom’s Temple of MST3K Stuff web site has collected images of movie posters from all of the films featured on the cult classic television show Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s a great collection of B-movie imagery, covering a wide selection of genres, from the The Crawling Eye to Danger: Diablik.
If there is one thing that “Photoshop geeks” love to do, it is to rework images — “remixing” them — to create a new (and sometimes humorous) result. These often get submitted to sites soliciting “Photoshop contests” and other image posting mayhem. Popular sites like Fark.com, SomethingAwful.com, and b3ta.com all garner submissions of these type of image “smashups”. One of the most popular Photoshop sites with this type of user-submitted photo remixing: Worth1000.com.
As you might guess, the number one source for Photoshop remixing, both as a subject matter and visual source material, is movie posters. In Worth1000.com’s “Mate a Movie” Photoshop contest, users create movie poster image submissions that are of “two or more movies, combined to make one much funnier movie.” Looking through the most recent contest’s entries, there are some pretty funny posters, ranging from movies like Freaky Friday the 13th to Poohlander. (via JoBlo.com)
MovieMaker Magazine has a 2004 interview with three illustrators lamenting the state of movie poster design in relation to art. Artists Drew Struzan, John Berkey, and John Solie offer their take on the “declining state of movie poster art”:
“I think the ’80s were the era when poster art was strongest,” says Drew Struzan. “It started to taper off in the ’90s when computers came into it; it took a lot of work away. People got excited about this new medium of computers for the last 10 years to the point where there were hardly any illustrations at all. As they learned how to use computers, the quality of the work kind of declined.”
Speaking of newspaper ads, the Newspaper Association of America continues their series of “Newspaper Literacy” ads with a series of posters from Robots: The Movie.
The long running newspaper literacy ad series is designed to help newspapers around the country promote newspaper readership using ad artwork from popular Hollywood films. Past literacy ad posters include: The Incredibles, Shrek 2, and Ella Enchanted.
