VHS?

Saw this on YouTube and thought it was great. Many over the years have been saying the same thing. The efforts into making movie posters today is piss-poor at best. No wonder the custom DVD art thing is still going today.

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Mondo Kane

Perfect

Dr. DVD

Great. I remember Peter Jackson showing off his collection of James Bond movie posters at his office (in one of his webcasts) and remarking about how no one really bothers with making them elaborate anymore.

Alan Smithee

I knew movie posters were a dying art when I worked at a 16-screen theater (built in 1999) that only had about 8 or so poster cases out front, so they were usually unable to display posters for every movie that they were showing.

As far as cover art, that's one thing that's going to keep selling media over downloads- the biggest problems with disc packaging right now is how many studios (mainly Warner) have ditched full-color picture labels on discs in favor of monochrome labels with usually nothing more than the movie's title.

resinrats

Not me. I buy media just to have a physical copy. I could care less about the artwork, especially on the disk itself. 99.999999% of the time, I won't see the artwork since I only see the spine of the case & see anything else when I pick it out to watch, which takes less then a minute. After I watch, it goes back in the case and back on the shelf. All I ask is the title of the movie easily visible.

What I have an issue with reguarding movie posters is the constant posters that don't have the name of the movie on it. Some don't have any words, some just have a number, or some have a texting spelling of the movie. Granted, this is usally withe established brands but sometimes, I didn't see the first movie so I have to hope I have seen something about the movie to know what the poster is about.

Abob Teff

Guilty ...

Why So Blu?

I love the art form of "The Movie Poster" and agree with the video. It's a niche industry and Mondo is very successful at it. A shitty cover on a Blu-ray or theatrical poster will not deter me from seeing the film or buying the physical copy, though.

VHS?

It's just a lost art.
I remember back in the day going to the video store to rent a VHS or BETA and the cover always intrigued me. Sometimes the cover actually did make me rent it only to find it was a shitty movie. But the cover was so cool !

PhantomStranger

It was an advertising medium that had a lot more relevance in its original era. The widespread availability of trailers destroyed the poster as a viable way of advertising a movie.

Rockmjd23

Whoever is responsible for the 90s floating head trend ruined it forever.

brayzie

Pretty much.
I do miss looking at the cool teaser posters in theaters advertising future movies. But look at the viral campaigns that took their place. The ones for The Dark Knight were pretty impressive. And wasn't big faces an issue with hand painted art as well? Drew Struzan for example?

I guess another reason we don't have intriguing movie posters anymore is that peoples attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. People won't remember a subtle movie poster but they'll remember the giant face of Jennifer Lawrence.

The Wolverine had some excellent poster art. Didn't know that X-Men: First Class teaser posters were originally just silhouette. Pretty nice if they would have left it at that.

PatD

Photoshop--it was the beginning of the end.

Michael Corvin

Which is why it's even more mind boggling. People don't find out about movies because of a lobby poster anymore, so why the dumbed down 'giant picture of the star' bullshit? Things should have come full circle by now. People know about movies before going to the theater so a unique old school poster would catch someone's attention at the theater.

Poor examples. Original (and beautiful) posters:






And the lack of a ROTK poster in this style has kept me from grabbing them for display. This example has been brought up before and a user here worked on them, if I'm not mistaken(or at least at the studio and was in the loop). He also said there is a matching ROTK poster in the same vein but the studio wouldn't use it, opting for the giant heads style.

mrhan

Movie posters today are shit compared to the ones I grew up with in the 70's and 80's. You actually stopped to check out the poster art.



http://www.pinterest.com/illgal/movi...eal-adams-fra/

Dan

That's the best "no hotlinking" image I've seen yet.

Jaymole

That would make a great movie poster

caligulathegod

Following the link there is a lot of cool posters. As much as I love Jack Davis, he really was a cliche all to himself. He was a Mad Magazine artist and all his posters look like Mad Magazine parodies. His most famous poster is probably It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and maybe The Bad News Bears. That poster had a million imitators and 90% were him. The most famous imitation is probably Rick Meyerowitz's Animal House poster (itself ripped off dozens of times).

I love the Neal Adams stuff and the Frazetta after he stopped imitating Jack Davis.

RichC2

These are all on EWs List of 25 best of 2013, but these stood out to me no less:

orangerunner

I guess it's another sign of the times.

For me, the poster art was a major ingredient of the whole film-going experience and followed up by the renting/buying experience.

Right now, I feel somewhat out of touch with what new movies are playing. Perhaps I'm just old school but if you look in the local newspaper, they rarely advertise movies anymore. Just a few years ago, movie ads/reviews used to fill whole sections in every major newspaper. Now they squeeze everything onto the back page of the "Sports" section.

Same goes for TV and magazines. Advertisement has disappeared into youtube trailers, Facebook and Twitter.

If anyone remembers the ma and pa video stores of the 1980s, the studios used to supply them with posters, 6-foot tall cardboard displays, banners etc.

Once Blockbuster dominated, they had maybe three or four posters in their windows, the rest of the landscape was dominated by "BLOCKBUSTER" signs.

VHS?

I remember bugging 'Ma & Pa' stores for posters and other movie displays back in the '80s
I know we have trailers now and they are everywhere, but you still need a poster to display at theaters. You still need box art for DVD/Blu and there is no effort anymore.
Like said, Photoshop made it too easy to copy/paste cheap posters and art together.

Draven

I haven't conducted a scientific study, but if I had to guess, I'd say there are plenty of cool posters out there and a lot of garbage too. Which is how it has always bee, Having worked at a video store in the 90s, there were plenty of dumb posters floating around then and garbage covers for a lot of the VHS tapes too.

I also don't long for the "old" days because I much prefer renting a high def movie from my couch than having to drive to the local video store on a Friday night and spend an hour there looking for something to watch. And I also like not having to find a newspaper to see what movies are playing. I'm sure people from that time had similar ideas about the way things before too.

I seriously don't get the nostalgia for a time when things were FAR less convenient.

Yeti4623

Not as much, but I do think there are still some cool posters being made. The dvd/blu-ray covers are mostly forgettable and sometimes awful, though.

Dr. DVD

TTT had a cool poster that was over the shoulder of Saruman looking out over his Uruk-hai army from Isengard.

Dr. DVD

Also, I was greatly misled by this VHS cover of an late 80s/early 90s ski movie. Granted, the snow ski stuff was really good, but I was wanting Tracy Scoggins in spandex, which isn't in the movie.

orangerunner

I understand it doesn't make a whole lot of sense but I guess back in the 1980s renting or buying a movie was a real novelty and you had to put in a fair amount of effort and money to get a movie.

Nowadays when the same things are instantly available and cheap (or free) they don't have much meaning and are considered disposable.

I imagine when the teens of today reach forty or fifty years old, they'll be nostalgic for a long lost technology or an old method of doing something that has been replaced by newer technology.