I love movie posters. I’ve had them littering my wall since middle school, and I’m always impressed when a studio takes a chance on a design that isn’t a floating head or a blue/orange color scheme. Too often, studios play it safe, but when they go outside the box, they can come up with something you want to take out of the multiplex and bring home. It not only sells the film; it elevates the film by mere association.
With the help of the exhaustiveIMP Awards archives, I went through thousands of studio released posters (meaning no Mondo or other boutique posters) and whittled it down to the fifty I thought were the best. These posters played with art style, perspective, or just went above and beyond in some way that was clever, daring, and unforgettable. Every film on this list may not be great, but it definitely had a great poster.
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50.) Devil
Just try to ignore the “From the Mind of M. Night Shyamalan” at the bottom and you have a very cool, very aggressive image that does a good job selling a film that has no stars.
49.) Sound of My Voice
This one may get a little too deep into the film its promoting at the cost of alienating those who don’t get the reference, but it looks nothing like any other poster out there, and that’s enough to get you wanting more.
48.) Wonder Woman
Even if you removed the word “power” from this poster, it would still convey that sentiment through Wonder Woman’s stance, the lighting, and the colors.
47.) Blackkklansman
I love the dark comedy of this poster, taking the horrific symbolism of a klan hood and then tearing it down with a black power stance. It also conveys the entire plot of the movie in one image, which is of a black cop impersonating a klansman.
46.) The Martian
This thoughtful design shows that Mars not only occupies Mark Watney’s mind; it’s also his prison.
45.) The Master
Give me a good throwback poster any day. I like how the poster conveys the 1960s technicolor style of the movie while still being sly and sinister in its own right.
44.) Suicide Squad
You have a poster that needs to convey a lot of characters (even Slipknot is on here!) and so composition becomes everything. The designers found an ingenious way to do it by transplanting them all into a colorful mushroom cloud to convey the destructiveness and unpredictability of these characters.
43.) The Devil’s Double
If you were walking by this, you would have to stop and look twice. The gaudy, saturated gold demands the viewer’s attention and makes he or she want to know more.
42.) The Cabin in the Woods
While it may not have the punchy taglines of earlier posters for the film (“If you hear a strange sound outside…have sex."), this poster does a great job of teasing the mystery of the film rather than playing on horror beats. Its how you sell subversion in a single image.
41.) 127 Hours
This poster wins points for sheer cleverness. I went for years without spotting that this is an hourglass.
