It’s fitting that we start this week’s This Week in Posters with Assassin’s Creed, because I think this might be this week’s worst poster. It’s the old “pyramid of characters” design, but the proportions are all off. Why stick the other characters inside Michael Fassbender’s torso again? Do they live inside the heart of the assassin? Also, they got Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and Jeremy Irons to star in a video game movie? What is happening?
I’m just glad the jumping figures are there in the background to let me know that there will be parkour. As long as there is still parkour I know the whole world hasn’t gone crazy.
[all posters via IMPA]
Oh man, get a load of these BAD KIDS! I knew that one in front was a bad egg just from her over-applied eye make up. It’s always the raccoon girls who do the bad stuff. She probably, like, skips class because she’s so over it. I bet she’s so over everything. So bad.
By the way, I can’t stop looking at the prematurely balding kid on the right and his forehead creases. Those are the “cool rebel” forehead creases, Luke Perry-style. That is too much forehead for one kid! I don’t care how bad he is. He looks like a baby in a newscaster wig.
“What if today was the only day of the rest of your life?”
Hmm, is the answer “You’d dress warmly?”
Aw, look, it’s baby Drive. By the way, I refuse to believe that “Bel Powley” is a person’s name, sorry.
This is from a batch of special edition Doctor Strange posters, which are pretty great at evoking all the things that I liked about the movie. “The secret, you see, is controlling the circles.”
I don’t remember Mads having such a nice part in his hair. Perhaps I was distracted by all his smoky eye makeup. Smoky eyes are really hot right now in the Dormammu dimension right now.
What am I wearing? Well, you see, these are my floatin’ scarves.
I like to imagine this star had six points at first until someone caught it. The six-pointed star portal takes you to a secret racist internet commenter dimension where everything is fake and gay.
I see they’re trying to sell The Eagle Huntress as this life-affirming, inspirational tale of a young girl. That’s cool and all, but why turn it generic when you don’t have to? Why use a hook a hundred movies can use when you can just use the one only you have? Like, maybe instead of “Witness one girl’s dream take flight,” go with “She’s hunting with eagles! EAGLES, MAN! Come see the eagles tear apart game with their very large talons, OOOH WAH-AH AH AH!”
This dude looks like his armor is made out of Donald Trump’s living room.
This dude looks like he just found out his armor is made out of Donald Trump’s living room.
I like that Willem Dafoe plays a weird monk, but I’m worried there won’t be enough lens flares.
“I Am Not A Serial Killer. I am part of Mads Mikkelson’s gang from Doctor Strange. Hence the smoky eye makeup.”
By the way, this pull quote is still rolling around in my head. “Does for serial killers what Donnie Darko did for time travel.”
For the life of me, I can’t figure out what that means. What did Donnie Darko do for time travel? Gyllenhaal’d it? Anyway, I guess I am still slightly intrigued, if only to figure out what the shit that means.
Patrick Wilson always looks like he just stepped out of the fifties. Also, Jessica Biel looks kind of Asian in this, which makes me wonder why she didn’t get Emma Stone’s part in Aloha. Or Matt Damon’s in Great Wall. Or Scarlett Johansson’s in Ghost in the Shell. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a lot of work out there for Jessica Biel.
Clearly they were going with the Apocalypse Now vibe in this Kong: Skull Island poster. Which is clever, because it distracts from all the dumb reboot clichés, like having to call King Kong just “Kong” now. Oh, you shortened the name? How novel. That’s clean and rad and powerful.
The other reboot cliché: using scale as a selling point. “Remember King Kong? What if he was EVEN BIGGER! Badass, right? This Kong will be the best Kong because he is the biggest.”
Uh…
First off, this looks way more like a sex position than a fatherly superhero gently protecting his charge. Secondly, it looks like his torso and legs are separate entities, like Hugh Jackman has one guy operating his upper body and one his lower, like two guys in a horse costume. Is that true? Does this poster accidentally reveal the secret of Hugh Jackman?
First we had Cars, and everyone understood that there would also be trucks in the movie, but then Donald Trump got elected, proving codes don’t work anymore, better to just say the thing instead of hinting at it with some dog whistle, and now we have “Monster Trucks.” I guess what I’m saying is that Cars is racist and so are little kids.
This Mostly Sunny poster was kind of a slam dunk — “from porn star to Bollywood princess” sort of says it all. It’s neat that you can do that in India. To paraphrase The Dude, “So sexually, they’re pretty cool?”
Speaking of, what’s Sasha Grey up to these days? I may have to, uh, Google her later.
See, if you’re going to do the pyramid-of-characters poster, take a lesson from Rogue One, not Assassin’s Creed. For one thing, the characters aren’t all stuffed inside one person’s torso. For another, there’s reason for it. At least, I think there is. With a movie that comes out mid-December I don’t think it’s too much to assume the poster deliberately mimics an upside-down Christmas tree.
First we had the Kong poster doing an homage to Apocalypse Now, now Rogue One seems to be doing Platoon. And yes, that logo still looks like a pear-shaped fleur de lis to me.
I like her hair. Did they have ombre long long ago in a galaxy far far away? At least they’re sort of trying. In the original Star Wars, everyone had gigantic ’70s hair. ’70s hair, at least for men, must be a good four times the size of any comparable era. I didn’t even know hair could get that big. Like, you weren’t a real man in the 70s unless you had at least five inches of hair on all sides of your head. Don’t believe me? Here’s Warren Beatty in 1975.
Speaking of ’70s fashion in Star Wars, I like that 40 years later the characters are still stuck with puffy-collared vests.
Is that his boomstick? Whatever, there are a lot of these character posters.
Here’s an Italian poster for Snowden. I like Italian, because it’s impossible to overdo the sing-songey delivery. You’ll think you’re making fun of them and they’ll be like “Mamma mia, who-a taught-em a-you to a-speak-a so well?”
Anyway, this poster looks like the opening credits from Homeland.
You couldn’t just swap the names so they line up? Would that have been so hard? Ugh. That said, this is another great example of how you can include those strong diagonals all poster designers seem to love without just tilting the horizon line inexplicably sideways. Also their crotches are lined up. That makes people think of the sex.
Oh damn, is Daniel Bruhl playing that lion cub? Very cool. You may have also noticed that Jessica Chastain is doing that close-eyed headbutt poster thing, only with a lion. Cool, very cool.
Anyway, I will never forgive this movie for not being called “We Bombed A Zoo.”