What I really want to know is what's holding companies up from using the original poster art for DVD/Blu Ray covers?

My guess is that they have to pay the artist of the poster another fee.

I really doubt that any artist was or is keeping any royalties or copyright over movie posters. Criterion and a couple other studios use them on occasion but I think the thinking these days tends to be that consumers want 'contemporary' even for old movies. What gets me is why they don't put cover/poster galleries on the disc - surely that must be the easiest/cheapest and smallest-disc size special feature they could make.

Anyways, here's my nomination for worst cover

One reason may be that studios seem very worried about the "visibility" of their movies. What works on a 24-inch poster may not work as well on a 7-inch DVD case. They want you to be able to grasp 1) the title and 2) who's in it from a few feet away. Only when the image itself has become iconic do I see studios retaining poster artwork.

The other reason studios change poster artwork is that new artwork constitutes enough of a reason to consider an old DVD a new "edition" and thus get stores to re-order stock. With catalog titles, stores will often order one batch of stock and then never order another, but if they change the cover every few months it will look like new product and might get re-ordered.

Meh.

I saw it in the theater, I could not believe they did that, really? good going there, I hate when covers give away too many plot points or the menus, it is possible we have NOT seen this yet.

Good point I hate the animated menus that you cannot skip through that proceed to show you beats from the movie you are about to watch.

I HATE that. Biggest offender is To Kill a Mockingbird. I show this to my students every year and I have to quickly get to the first scene because the animated menu reveals what Boo Radley looks like. It's such a memorable reveal in both the book and film, and even though we know by that time that he's not the squirrel-eating monster the kids initially paint him to be, it's still a surprising and moving scene.

/offtopic

That's an example of the re-release of a title with a new cover when the stars in it become bigger than they were when the movie was first made. I hate that trend..but like somebody else already pointed out the studio wants to bring visibility of who is in the movie from a glance. So we get stuck with bad covers for re-releases.

I think the worst offender of this (and there may be others...this is just the first one I think of) is Wet Hot American Summer. When the movie came out the biggest names in it were that brother from Frasier and Janine Garoffolo? Yeah, not exactly big name stars. But the other people in it are a who's who of comedy movies today. So the inevitable re-release with the new floating head cover came out to focus on these bigger name stars.


The original cover is MUCH better...in line with classic artwork for movies like American Graffiti and Animal House. WHAS isn't as iconic as those movies, of course, so they can screw around with the cover art and get away with it, I suppose.

I do not agree with this selection.

love the movie and the anchor bay cover is good but this is just awful

Not sure the original cover release is much better... but it is better....

I actually prefer the new cover to the old cover, because while the idea of the painting is fine, I really don't like the final product. However, my DVD is autographed by Michael Showalter, so I'm stuck with the old-fashioned version.

Me neither. That's a great cover.

I agree, except that the title is hard to read.

Here's a previous thread on this topic:

What DVD has the worse cover art?

Scary that this DVD is sold for $60.00 new.

This is absolutely one of my least-favorite cover artworks of all time. The color of Murray's skin in the background photo mixed with the hand (certainly not his) holding the clock makes him look like a bizarro wax zombie. The fact that he's also on the clock is stupid (how being the hands of a clock conveys being trapped in a day better than being literally trapped inside the clock face is beyond me). And, just as icing on the cake, the cover art commits one of my major pet peeves, which is positioning the actors under the wrong names. When they released this edition on Blu-Ray I was really hoping they'd revert to the classic art, where Bill's trapped in the clock, but no dice.

Sure, the girl is hot, but...

1. she's not in the movie
2. what's with the glowing, possessed eyes?
3. what's with the castle?

this also counts

assuming thats the psychologist, she never holds a gun and never wears that outfit in that movie at all

one I always disliked...why did they chose the dog?!!

When you have a big star that's not willing to model for the poster art, that is what you get.