WTF Happened to Movie Posters?

David

Charlie

He acts like floating heads are some new thing:




Just face it, like all things some are good and some are good until everyone copies you...

Eisenhower

True! Good post David!

HONDO

Just confirms to me that this is just a small part of what is wrong with what is happening in the world of film making these days. 

jayn_j

Old news, and IMO irrelevant.

The bigger question is how long paper posters will be printed?  The multiplexes around here are slowly replacing poster frames with video posters, at least inside the theater.  Mall cinemas have pretty much completely eliminated paper.

David

Working from an ever fading memory, floating heads were on posters from the 30s so I am assuming even earlier. Probably the only way one could make all the stars identifiable - make the heads bigger and remove the bodies.

Charlie

I also think that people go to movies to see the celebrities now too.  Movies aren't the draw they once were so people don't take chances.  If they know that they like to watch Chris Pratt then worst case they get to see Chris Pratt.

Eisenhower

Star power has always attracted patrons to theaters-floating heads not something new of course-but I think his point is what he sees as lazy uncreative computer generated posters. Floating heads of old were typically artist created. Changes with technology...

jayn_j

1948


1934


Could go on and on.  But even these have more imagination than the modern ones.

jayn_j

Oh, and vanity requires I add this one I just received from Bruce.  1928 WC Fields lobby card.

David

jayn_j said:

vanity requires I add this one I just received from Bruce.  1928 WC Fields lobby card.

lol

I don't know when the first floating head movie poster came out but a quick scan of Bruce's database and one can find this one which I think is probably the best version of a floating heads one because it is in inherent in the design and not about jamming lots of stars (heads) on the poster

Woman (1918) - US1SH



On a secondary note, Bruce might want to tidy up a few of these...pretty sure Marilyn wasn't around in 1909: http://www.emovieposter.com/agallery/tag/decade%3A1900s/archive.html looks like an anomaly in the database picks up movies in the 2000s and drops them into the 1900s.

Bruce

It is exactly that, David. When we started the database in 1998, we naively thought, "we will never auction posters from after 2000, so why not use 2 digits for the year?"

What a blunder that was! So we have a "Year 2K" problem.

We have been slowly converting to 4 year dates, but it is a slow process.

Thanks for pointing out the above errors. We will get those fixed.

And if you (or anyone here) sees ANY errors, large or small, let us know and we promise to fix them.

Like Blanche Dubois, we rely on the kindness of strangers to make that database the most accurate there is!