I know Jackie and Jet Li were the big selling points for the film but how do you not put the star of the movie, Michael Angarano, anywhere on the box? His picture is totally absent from the front and back cover. The only mention of him is tiny credits on the bottom and he is the last person listed.

Has there ever been another instance of this?

Zodiac DC?

*One that pictures other cast but not the star(s).

M*A*S*H season five, other cast members are pictured, there is no picture of Alan Alda, front or back cover. I thought that really odd.

Is Ben Stiller considered the star of "Heavyweights"? His name and picture are both nowhere to be found on the DVD packaging.

That's the opposite of the Forbidden Kingdom example. It depends on what we consider "the star" to mean. Does it refer to the main character of the movie or to the most famous person in the movie? The person who started the thread thinks it's the former.

The Lord of the Rings EEs and LEs. No one's pictures are on the boxes.

Quickly going through my collection, I can see:

Apocalypse Now Redux
Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier
The Big Red One (2-disc)
Blade Runner (5-disc)
Fight Club (2-disc)
The Godfather: Collection or The Coppola Restoration
Magnolia
The Matrix: Collection
Mean Streets
Platoon (2-disc; steelbook)
Se7en (2-disc)
Sin City: Recut, Extended, Unrated

... and a lot of Criterion Collection DVDs.

FOTR LE shows the characters in little tiny boats on the cover.


Just to clarify the OP's request, he's looking for DVD covers that do show actors on it, but that don't show the lead actor(s) on it.

Like his example, Forbidden Kingdom, which shows Jackie Chan and Jet Li on the cover, but not the actor that played the lead character.

So the LOTR EE discs, or all of Apone's examples are wrong, since those don't show any actors at all, and thus it's not odd that the lead actor doesn't appear either.

For example, Real Genius has Val Kilmer on the cover, but (co)lead Gabriel Jarret is nowhere to be found.

Yeah, OK, didn't notice his qualification in Post #3.

I just went through my collection, and I can't see any other cover that fits your description. I didn't know Jet Li and Jackie Chan were not the main characters in this film. I haven't seen it yet, but I plan on picking it up when the price drops just to see those two in action together. I guess the studios don't considered the "lead" actor in this film to be cover worthy.

I did consider all the Spider-man covers, since Tobey is nowhere on the front covers, just that clown in the red and blue tights (hehehe). Tobey is present on the back of 2 and 3 though.

Well, I have a few older Jackie Chan movies (The Killer Meteors comes to mind) where Jackie isn't the lead actor, but he's put on the cover for marketing purposes. Although, now that I think about it, I can't swear that the actual star, Jimmy Wang Yu, doesn't appear in one of those smaller boxes somewhere.

I found it funny that James McAvoy, the lead in "The Last King of Scotland", only has three tiny images of him on the image "collage" on the back of the cover while Forest Whitaker not only has six appearances in that same collage, he's featured prominently on the back and THREE times on the front cover.