August 8th, 2004

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Movies
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Poster Designers, Take Note

I don’t know about you, but I think the posters for Man on Fire and Out of Time are a little too similar:

Orange background, Denzel wearing shades, he’s walking, only his upper torso shown (are his feet hideously ugly?). It doesn’t help that both movie titles are three short words and were released within six months of each other. Clearly they’re banking on Mr. Washington’s charisma and star power, but this is a tad ridiculous. Either one accidentally copied the other, one intentionally copied the other, or they’re adhering a little too closely to their focus group test results. I see a lot of movies, and I picked up Out of Time in the video store, wondering why Man on Fire had been released on DVD so quickly.

Comments: 4 Responses so far

alison
August 8th, 2004
6:31 pm

personally, i’m getting quite tired of movie poster designs. they have become quite ego-centric in the last little while. there are sp many more things you could do to promote a movie then simple pictures of the star and titles.

HEY, lemme at’m!

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Derek
August 8th, 2004
10:52 pm

That is a big part of the problem. Do either of those posters (or either of the movie titles, for that matter) tell you anything at all about the films? (Other than that they’re unlikely to be chick-flicks.)

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Sesan
August 9th, 2004
2:37 pm

I could run circles around that, and I’m not even a professional designer – just a hack who is fairly good in Photoshop and Illustrator.

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Dez
August 13th, 2004
11:44 am

The gap between theatre and DVD is getting a *lot* shorter, but yeah, the resemblance is kind of spooky.

I agree with you that neither of those films had marketing campaigns that reflected the content of the movie. Out of Time is sort of an Elmore Leonardy thing, only short on the screwball moments- but definitely in the South Florida wacko genre (Dave Barry’s words). The poster and trailers made it look like a revenge flick- not so much.

Man on Fire could have been marketed more at women that it was- it had its violent, revenge bits, but there were some great moments between Washington and Dakota Fanning (who is one of the best little kid actors going- I enjoy her much more than I expected to) and the overall feel of the movie turns out to be more about redemption than revenge. It could have been a little less heavy-handed, but once you threw in the delight of the Chris Walken moment, we enjoyed it quite a lot.

I love Craig Kilborn’s (soon to be leaving Late Late Show) movie poster review.

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