The reel deal: When posters outshine the movies they sell

Whether it’s Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Amelie or The Castle, movie posters are always popular decorations in homes – often mementos of favourite cinema experiences. Other people like to collect and display posters of Hitchcock or James Bond films.

In the art world, collectors pay huge sums for rarities. One of only four surviving copies of the original German poster for the 1927 sci-fi classic Metropolis sold for $US690,000 ($1.099 million) in 2005, which is still a world record for any type of poster.

The rich and wonderful history of movie posters dates back to when the Lumiere brothers promoted their sessions in the early days of cinema by showing a beam of light projected onto a screen so potential customers knew how the new art form differed from a stage show.

But how important are movie posters now that trailers and social media do so much to promote new releases, and so many films head to streaming services rather than cinemas?

Tony Nourmand, editor of the new book 1001 Movie Posters: Designs of the Times, concedes they are not as essential in film marketing as they once were but thinks that amazing work is still being done by artists and designers.

“Everybody likes movie posters,” he says. “Everybody likes movies.”

Wanting to own a particular poster can reflect a complicated blend of emotions. As well as affection for a film, there is nostalgia for the experience of watching it at a certain time in your life, wanting a physical connection to a beloved actor or director, simple appreciation for something brilliantly designed or even aspiration for how you want to be perceived. A French New Wave poster? “I have sophisticated tastes.” Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s? “I’m stylish.” Taxi Driver? “Edgy.” Endless Summer? “Cool older dude”.

Nourmand’s interest in posters dates back to watching films in Tehran as a child. “I was six or seven when my uncle used to take me to the cinema,” he says from London. “He would know the manager, so after the movie, they would have a drink or a coffee together.

“He would always say, ‘Go to the back. There are posters there. Just pick whatever you want’. So I used to pick them up, go home and tack them to the wall. I’d rip them down to put something else up the following week.”

Being the late 1960s – early 1970s, these posters were often for Bruce Lee and John Wayne movies. But Nourmand’s taste has broadened considerably.

In the early 1990s, he started buying and selling vintage posters then co-owned a London gallery showcasing them until 2010. When a book he compiled, Film Posters of the 60s, sold out quickly, Nourmand started Reel Art Press and has since published many more poster books.

An eye-catching poster is a clever combination of image, text and colour, often with a memorable tagline like “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water” (Jaws 2) or “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies” (The Social Network).

So what makes a great one?

“I don’t care what country a poster is from, what language it’s in, whether it’s a stone lithograph or a photo montage,” Nourmand says. “I think it has to capture an atmosphere, and it has to sell [the movie]. If you think about some of the most famous images in the world, like King Kong on top of the Empire State Building or Mickey Mouse, the first time anyone ever saw them was on a movie poster. That’s a powerful thing.”

While he says the book includes 1001 great examples – sometimes showing how different countries took different approaches to marketing a movie – his personal favourites include Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 1958 (“eye-catching, and it gets your imagination going”) and 1933’s The Invisible Man (“you just see a silhouette, and it’s got atmosphere”).

But lest that indicates the best examples are from the distant past, Nourmand also mentions the brilliance of the 2005 poster for Walk The Line designed by Shepard Fairey of Barack Obama Hope fame, a colourful British poster for 2019’s Parasite and one by British illustrator James Paterson for 2023’s awards-qualifying cinema release of David Fincher’s Netflix film The Killer, which had the memorable tag “Execution is everything”.

Some directors have long relationships with poster designers. Clint Eastwood worked with designer-art director Bill Gold for more than four decades up to 2011’s J. Edgar. “He’s regarded as the Godfather in the business,” Nourmand says. “When he did the poster for Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood really liked it and said, ‘I want you to do [all] my posters’.”

“But the first poster Bill designed was for Casablanca. If you look at it, Bogart is holding a gun. Bill said he got the gun from The Maltese Falcon, which was out a year earlier, and he put it in his hand because he hadn’t seen the movie.”

As that suggests, posters can sometimes be as untruthful as the trailers that show moments that aren’t in the movie or gloss over the fact that Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street or Wicked are musicals so as not to deter ticket buyers.

Especially guilty are exploitation posters from the 1960s. “Some of them were European art-house movies that they used to market as X-rated porno films just because they had some titillation in them,” Nourmand says.

Marilyn Monroe was barely known when the crime film The Asphalt Jungle was released in 1950, but she was a star by the time it was re-released in Italy. “Marilyn is in the movie for something like three-and-a-half minutes,” Nourmand says. “The re-release poster is a painting of her in a sexy dress glowing, and it says ‘Asphalt Jungle starring Marilyn Monroe’.”

Sometimes, posters can play a key role in a film’s success. In 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had a space-themed poster and the tagline “an epic drama of adventure and exploration”, opened well. But it gained a second life when two new posters were released with psychedelic designs and the tagline “The ultimate trip”. Says Nourmand: “Everyone going to the movie would drop acid or smoke a joint. I think that poster took it to another level.”

One of the most famous posters in the book is for the 1958 exploitation film Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. “It’s not even a B movie,” Nourmand says. “It’s a Z movie. The poster is much better than the film.”

1001 Movie Posters: Designs of the Times is out now.