This week in This Week In Posters, we begin with a headscratcher on many levels. This is a foreign poster for A Bad Moms Christmas, which is already a surreal concept. (Did you know that Bad Moms was actually a huge hit? I thought it was terrible until I saw Fun Mom Dinner and realized how much worse this genre could be, simply by adding Adam Levine.) And then there’s Kathryn Hahn back there. Is that even Kathryn Hahn? Process of elimination would seem to suggest so, but otherwise it looks nothing like her. Which is a shame, because she’s so mind-blowingly talented that she actually managed to shine in a Bad Moms, which puts to shame anything that Brando did.
[all posters via IMPA]
Here’s another one for Pixar’s Coco, which seems to have a firefly theme. Years from now, we will look back at this and The Good Dinosaur as Pixar’s “Luminescence Phase.”
Is this a traditional Mexican creature or a Pixar invention? It seems to have a lion body, eagle feathers, wings, ram horns, and… am I missing anything? Seems a little busy is all. It’s like the Edsel of mythical creatures.
I feel like Pixar only draws this face on characters from exotic foreign lands.
Gotta love a poster that doesn’t even try to pretend the characters were in the same place in the original photo. Apparently this film was shot in 2007 and is only just now getting a release. To the poster’s credit, it looks exactly like a movie that’s sat on a shelf since 2007. I guess they were trying to make the inevitable food-pun burns even easier.
So far I gather that this movie is about dominos and nothing else. If the poster is already going to be a busy montage of random stuff and people, does it really need texture too? Ugh. Anyway, I really wish the tagline for this was “WHY’S JAMES CRYIN?”
Here Gerard Butler stars in the poster for A Family Man, which I assume depicts the very first part of the movie before the terrorists kill his family and he murders everyone. But wait, why does the kid have on a sherpa jacket? That’s usually movie code for “poor.” Fine, I’ll bite, I’m going to IMDb:
A headhunter whose life revolves around closing deals in a a survival-of-the-fittest boiler room, battles his top rival for control of their job placement company — his dream of owning the company clashing with the needs of his family.
Huh. So no one gets shot or blown up or anything? Lame. I would tell you the more specific synopsis, which would explain why the son looks poor, but it seems like kind of a spoiler.
The kid has cancer.
I love these 1930s-style posters for Ferdinand. Also, it feels like the tagline is describing me.
Whoa. The flower petals are bulls. I don’t know what the flower and the bee have to do with anything (is it like the bulls and the bees? like a sex metaphor? because he’s born to love?), but I love it. Little kids need more modernist expressionism in their lives.
This looks like if Land’s End made condom ads. If never seen anything try to be Nicholas Sparks so hard. Also per IMDb:
After being gone for a decade a country star returns home to the love he left behind.
A decade? How old was he when he left, 10?
Ooh, Dubai. That’s a new one. I don’t think I’ve seen their landmarks destroyed in a disaster movie before. Hmm, I wonder who financed this.
I know Isle of Dogs (trailer here) is #problematic and all, but I am here for it. I think stop-motion might’ve been Wes Anderson’s true calling all along. Anyway, I don’t know if this poster truly captures the texture of the trailer, but it is very center framed. Which is #onbrand. They really downplayed the yellow text in this. Can’t have Wes Anderson without yellow text, I always say.
The chimp seems like he’s placed at boob level, and is sort of posed like a breastfeeding child. Am I reading too much into this? Perhaps. It’s just that I’ve always wanted to watch Jane Goodall breastfeed a chimp.
GRR, FUTURA FONT!
Here we have another poster for the Jigsaw movie, which is either trying to make him look like a New Guinean tribesman or the Joker. A torture porn most artsy. I can’t wait.
I don’t know if the crocodile reads crocodile enough here.
I honestly can’t keep straight which Noah Baumbach movies I’ve seen or haven’t seen at this point, but if this one consists entirely of Dustin Hoffman giving younger men earnest life lessons in different stately hats I will absolutely watch it.
This a great new poster for mother!, which is rightly trying to sell the controversy. Divisiveness is its most salient feature at this point, but you wonder if that was partly the result of them selling it as a horror movie (?) the first time around. Is there even a good way to sell mother!? I’m not sure.
Well it wouldn’t be a Takashi Miike movie without stylized swords and excessive facial scars, now would it. True story, I’m missing a screening of this right now to write this post.
This feels like the 17th batch of posters for My Little Pony: The Movie and they seem to get more propaganda like every time. We’re two batches away from Fluttershy telling me to inform on my family.
My mind goes blank every time I stare into the eye of the bird thing (?). This movie is trying to recruit my kids and I won’t stand for it.
This looks like the part of Starship Troopers where they fight the bugs. That was a fascism satire. “To live is to fight” sounds like something the drill sergeant in Starship Troopers would’ve shouted. You think this one is also satire? Probably not.
Oh hell yeah, we haven’t had a good “close-eyed headbutt” poster in a while. In a new twist, this looks like the headbutt it’s shorthand for triumph, rather than yearning. Still backlit by the sun though. No one ever close-eyed headbutts in low light.
If ever there was a perfect example of why mismatching name text and faces is annoying, it’d be this poster. Other than that, I get the sense that this movie is really going to blow the sunglasses onto my forehead.
I saw this the other day. The poster makes it seem like more of a horror movie than it is, like it’s The Orphan or something. Then again, I barely know how to describe this movie, let alone how to sell it. Good luck with that. “It’s totally Scandinavian!”
I’m impressed that they found the characters outfits that were almost as busy as all the text up there.
Cause may baaaay / you’re gonna be the one that saves maaaay / and after aaaaaalll / you’re my wonder…
Oh sorry, I misread that. Boy, they’re really burying the Woody Allen part, aren’t they? Though you can always tell by the title font. Woody Allen’s movies are more consistent in their title font than even Wes Anderson.