Spotting Movies: The Poster Method

These days, everyone's a critic. Or is awarded the potential to be. One of the tools that critics utilise the least is judging a movie by its poster. Unlike a trailer, judging a film just by looking at its poster is a very unrealiable method. Usually in a trailer, the best scenes of the movie are shown, and audiences can more or less feel an interest or not after watching it. But a poster is just one frame, and it's not even a screenshot. It's like the same with judging books by their cover. Books with shit covers (think: British Harry Potter) have good insides. whilst millions of books with super cool covers, have nothing but shit inside.

There are many films with sucky cheapass advertising budgets because all the funds have been spent on making a top quality film. Hence, bad poster, or no poster. And then there are movies that are just destined to be doomed no matter the amount of money put into them, so an effort is made to salvage them with cool posters.

Here's an example.Drool...

When you see this poster, you feel excited. "It's black. There's a big gun. His suit is sophisticated, skin tight and sexy. His face has a scar. Look at the cool logo font. 2009??? Now I have something to look forward to in the future!" This poster gets you excited. Is the movie good? We can't tell. Poster looks good, but poster is not same as movie. Must wait for trailer. That will tell us more. Hopefully that will be good, and you'll end up watching the movie. And if fortune really meant it to be, you'll come out of the theatre another satisfied consumer of Hollywood capitalism.

But there are also RARE cases where a movie has failed right from the poster stage. Here's an example.

Drool vessicles dry and empty.