One of our favorite pastimes here at good, old FilmDrunk is making fun of movie posters that look like they featured more Photoshop work than a studio shoot with the Kardashians (*monkey rimshot*). Earlier this week, someone sent along a new contender for the worst movie poster that we’ve ever seen, from the movie Hit by Lightning, which stars Jon Cryer and Will Sasso in a story that I’m sure is filled with record scratches and dogs putting their paws over their eyes. On Wednesday, that same poster also became a mighty popular one for all the wrong reasons on Reddit’s r/Movies page, as it was declared to be possibly “the worst movie poster ever released.”
So just how bad is the movie poster in question, especially compared to the image above?
Hoo boy, that is certainly one hell of a stinker. But before we get all judgmental and try to drag the poster’s creator through the town square, Redditor and self-professed designer “entrepro” offered up an idea as to how something so terrible is made and released for the public to ridicule.
As a designer, I can tell you exactly how this happens.
Client asks designer/agency to put together a poster. Needed turnaround time is extremely quick (24-48 hrs). Client has an “idea” that they will not budge on, but the only resources they can provide is a bunch of random images. The designer may object, but the client says “sorry, it has to be this way. make it work.” Because of the time constraints and because the image had to be manufactured from random images, the result is crap.
I’m not saying this is what happened. But shit like what I described happens all the time. In those cases, it is really the clients fault.
Whether or not that is true is up to the poster designer who probably thought to himself, “I can’t believe they paid for that,” but Sasso actually provided his own solution to this poster problem yesterday, while showing off his strong Photoshopping skills.
I still don’t have any interest in seeing this movie, but I’m pretty sure that Adam Sandler just found his first Netflix title.
For the record, here’s a clip from Hit by Lightning…
[protected-iframe id=”41f2e639144fe62a1414637f5efa561f-60970621-60085469″ info=”https://www.indiewire.com/embed/player.jsp?videoId=00000148-cd2c-d98d-a5f8-ffae07e00000&width=480″ width=”650″ height=”400″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” allowfullscreen=””]