What Happened to Movie Posters?

If you've scrolled through Netflix recently, could you tell me, hand on heart, that you could draw a single poster from memory afterwards?

Floating head. Floating head. Backlit silhouette. Floating head in sunglasses. Two people stood back-to-back looking moody. That'll be £20 per month, please.

There was a time when a movie poster was memorable... Back to the Future gave you everything in one frame - Marty rocking a skateboard, the iconic DeLorean glowing behind him, and a streak of fire pulling your eye across the page. You didn't need a trailer - that poster was the trailer! Ghostbusters gave us an entire brand identity with a logo and colour palette. And The Lord of the Rings trilogy posters were oil paintings. Genuinely frameable wall art. People bought them... they still do!

But that was then. Now we get a Photoshop comp that looks like it was knocked together on a Friday afternoon. The same orange-and-teal grade. The same Trajan font... so what happened to movie art?

I guess streaming happened. When a poster only needs to exist as a 200-pixel thumbnail on a phone, why bother with the craft? It's not selling the film anymore... it's selling a click. The artwork that used to seduce you from a bus stop now has to win a knife fight against fourteen other tiles in a 3-second scroll. A/B tested into oblivion, optimised for engagement and drained of anything that might make you feel something before pressing play.

The real sin is that this talent didn't vanish. Legends like Drew Struzan are still alive. There are illustrators on ArtStation right now doing much better work for fun, than what these mega-studios will commission in a decade. But they're just not being hired, because the accountants that now run the studios aren't paying for a poster when an algorithm will generate forty vanilla variants by lunchtime.

The decision makers sanitising this art form won't see it coming. One day they'll be sat in a boardroom asking why nobody gets excited about movies any more... why are opening weekends just a shrug? Then they'll pull up their engagement metrics, look at everything except the thing that actually matters - that it started here. The moment they stopped trying to make you feel something before you'd even bought a ticket.

You can't manufacture a cultural moment with a floating head and a teal grade.

I miss when posters tried.