WHY I HATE FLOATING HEADS
Close your eyes and imagine a movie poster. What did you think of it?
Was it the JAWS poster with the shark and the women? Maybe it was Back to the Future with Marty McFly and his chrome DeLorean. You could have also imagined the STAR WARS: Empire Strikes Back poster with floating heads of all characters with Darth Vader’s helmet looming in the background.
Back to the Future poster
In an article by parade.com, they listed the previous examples in the top 50 most iconic movie posters of all time. What I found interesting about this is that nine out of the ten top-grossing movies of all time did not have a movie poster listed (the one exception being Titanic).
It seems that in the last two decades we have had a reverse renaissance in movie poster art, especially in the sci-fi/superhero genres. Marvel takes up a large portion of releases every year and yet they are the culprits of some of the worst movie poster art.
While many may like the floating head style, I believe it should have ended after the STAR WARS saga but Marvel must disagree. If you are unfamiliar with what a floating head style means, it can be summed up as any poster that has cropped characters overlaid on each other. I find this style over-used and tacky.
The Movie poster should be more than an advertisement, it should be graphic art that allows the viewer to gain a glimpse of how the movie will feel and I think there are better ways to do that than the floating head method.
The JAWS movie poster is potentially the best example of poster art, and I do mean ART. The poster could be considered the most famous poster of all time. They could have illustrated a scene from the movie or (gulp) a floating head, but they used a simple visual that has now become synonymous with shark attacks.
Whether or not you care for superhero movies, you must agree that they could take a page from JAWS’s book. A most notable disappointment from Marvel and Sony was from Spider-Man: No Way Home. Fans had been anticipating the movie and the poster for months and they ended up disappointed again.
This speckle of a movie should have had the spectacle of a poster. Several fans of the movie created posters that blew the original out of the water. If fans can create posters that are better than the ones created by billion-dollar corporations like Marvel (owned by Disney) there must be a problem.
There are only a few solutions to this problem. First, fans must continue to create poster art that crushes the ones produced by the production companies. Second, appreciate good poster art when you see it.
There are still several good movies that have equally good posters and we need to share and post about them. The third goes along with the previous post on social media about how poor poster art is now. Use the hashtag #deathtofloatingheads and tag any movie production that uses a floating head poster. I believe there can be reverse to this reverse renaissance.
