Teaser poster for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
Many films have been released within the past 10 years, and with each film released, there are one or more versions of poster art released to promote the film. There are the teaser posters; the primary posters; the alternate second versions; sometimes even a third version. Multiply the amount of films released within the past decade, let’s say by three, and the sum is titanic (get it, Titanic?). Given this immense amount of posters, Dinca must divide the best and worst posters into multiple posts, and we’ll be posting up until the New Year. Perhaps, if we’re feeling ambitious, we may even select a Top 10 list for the past decade, however, with so many posters, it’s hard to rank, and it’s even more difficult to recall which films had great posters. Well, great posters are memorable — we’ll use that as our guiding light.
What makes a good poster; what are we looking for? Great poster art makes someone want to see the movie even if they know nothing about the film. It propels someone to get on the internet to research the film. Maybe they will go out of their way to watch the trailer instead of waiting around to be force-fed by a convenient television trailer. If the poster is really great, it will recruit an army of patrons, an army that wants to go out of their way to promote the film; spread the word; generate a buzz; hell, even blog about it, notwithstanding they haven’t even seen the film yet.
Certainly, great design and great typography are part of creating a great poster — the design can be innovative or a tried-and-true formula of the past — more importantly, though, the poster must best represent the story of the film, the motifs of the film, the tone of the film, and it needs to visualize the thematic elements of the film. Sometimes film posters are a big let down — usually when a poster propels you to see a movie, and then you watch it, only to find that the movie sucks. When this happens, we should salute the designer, because their design made a shitty movie look worthy of your time.
In addition to teaser poster for Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which is posted above, we have posted nine more admirable film posters below. Feel free to voice your opinions, critiques, and definitely nominate a candidate for your favorite film poster of the past decade, or nominate an atrocious poster. Ride with us as we ride through our mega-list.
