15 Popular Movie Poster Cliches

schön…

nothing new under the sun!

nice !

nice !

great compilation!

i’ve long threatened myself with the task of collecting poster images of guns featured prominently… that’s an endless endeavor….

What about “Man running,(holding gun optional) holding hand of woman trailing slightly behind?”

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. …you need to add Minority Report to the ‘Justice is blind’ set too

Well, to be fair: one shouldn’t include “Puss in Boots” on this list (1.). It’s an obvious spoof on the “Unforgiven” poster – and you can’t criticize someone from being clichéd when they’re already spoofing a cliché. Same thing goes for the “Austin Powers” movie(s), that even more obviously spoof the Bond franchise.

Also: just including several, different posters from the same movie to serve as filler for the list is kind of weak. In “Black & White Action Movie Posters” (8.), there are two posters from “Ghost Rider”, two from “From Paris With Love” (I think), two from the “Fast & Furious” franchise and two from the “Transporter franchise”. Of COURSE it’s going to have the same visual expression.
(Furthermore, “Season of the Witch” and “Cold Flame”, to name but two, don’t even seem to fit the style).

Other than that: awesome, awesome list. Made me laugh out loud.
Next up seems to be “Symbols Made Out Of Broken Buildings”, judging by the new “Star Trek” poster and the “Dark Knight Rises” poster.

they forgot to include “Shelter” in 5. In Bed. heheh

most of these are great, but “Blue”… Seriously? So there are 36 movies with blue posters. Why not just add to the list “Red” and find the posters that predominantly use that color? Or “Green”? Is it relay a cliche to use the sky, or the ocean, in a movie poster?

Just to be fair, and speaking as an art director that used to work directly in theatrical key-art (a fancy term for movie-poster design), a lot of these ideas are committee-designed. Meaning, marketing, and mainstream expectations are involved throughout the process. It’s usually the indie movies (the lesser known movie studios) that garner the better, more experimental posters.

but who did it first?

Another VERY common theme missed: names of stars are swapped above their images in poster. Never really understood why they to that.

That’s often a contractual star billing issue.

Where is the running from a ball of fire?

It’s a huge stretch claiming that using the colour blue heavily in a poster is a cliché.

I’m sorry, were you somehow expecting originality to come out of marketing? If the organisations and systems that produced these posters were capable of allowing true creativity, they’d be generating distinct works of their own, and someone else would be pumping out derivative junk to promote them. Advertising is, as Orwell so deftly put it, the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.

where’s monster carrying off girl? my favorite indeed.

You left out the “bowling alley.” Head shots of the stars in an arrangement like bowling pins. The star is the headpin, supporting actors make up the 7-10 split.

I can’t believe they used the color blue in a film called the Big Blue!

I’m pissed that this list did not include the genres of tipping sunglasses down on the nose or 5 teenagers faces lines up in a row for a horror movie.

Articles like this get a big ol’ “Fuck Off” from me.