THE LOST ART

What’s happened to the art of movie posters? 

Promotional material for films used to be creative, artistic and engaging. Right up until the late 80s most poster art was hand drawn... from the silent era of Birth of a Nation to modern classics like Jaws, The Goonies and Star Wars... 

These days we’re suffering boring, mundane and generic posters. I'm in Australia where the quality is far worse than anywhere else and you only have to check out the region 4 dvds of Just Friends, You Me & Dupree and Georgia Rule to see what I’m saying.

So what does this say about us? Have we come to a point in evolution where we accept mediocricy as a standard? (this spans a lot of mediums) It’s concerning that the bland stamping of poster art is appealing to people. I mean surely its working otherwise the marketing department wouldn’t do it, right!?? A friend of mine directed a film a few years ago and shopped it around at festivals with some really creative artwork. When he eventually sold the film to Fox they insisted that the point-of-sale artwork be dumbed down in order to sell. The result was hideous. 

Am I alone?


And then when we do get some impressive looking movie posters, they're all so goddamn generic!
Check out all of these examples below. Individually we look at these and think "Wow!" but I can recall thinking that exact same "Wow!" over and over and over.