Good Poster Art

   The quality of studio posters are on the upswing while fan posters have gotten increasingly worse.

  Most Fan Posters amount to very little. When they're not pastiche/reference slop, they're typically esoteric visual puns that reek of desperation. They want, so badly, to be perceived as 'clever' but garner nothing more than an "ah-ha" in the viewer. Or, worse: woefully ill-fitting font, textures, and imagery misrepresenting the movie. Absent is a sense of awe, intrigue, mystery, et all purely alluring spectacle.

  And I used to eat up the former, too. I thought this was the coolest fan poster ever:

  But now I look at it and I'm like "Yep...that sure is a shark fin, alright............." It's definitely clever but that only gives it the illusion that it's intriguing. It grabs my attention but it can't sustain a hold on me. I especially hate the narrow and weightless font, a baffling change that subtracts from it.

  I was going to post the original here for contrast but I don't need to: It's already conjured in your head. It's so simple, so evocative, so textured, and concise. Same goes for the Silence Of The Lambs poster (which is the greatest poster of all time), I don't need to show you what's already in your frontal lobe right now! And that's an example of a poster that has the best of both worlds: it's just as eye-bugging as it is clever. There are layers and complexity to it but it also manages to be subtle and concise at the same time. It's a remarkable one sheet.

Meanwhile, a fan poster:

  

    So I decided to celebrate some of the best Studio-mandated posters that have come out this decade. I've wanted to do this for a while now, especially since we're dangerously close to most studios using generative A.I. to make, upscale, or touch-up posters (like A24 did with Civil War in 2024).