In addition to the plethora of mini-booze bottle comprising the film's title, part of what made the very first poster for The Rum Diary so much fun was that it eschewed the obvious by not simply being one big image of Johnny Depp. Since Depp is an international super-mega-movie star and all, most marketing campaigns for his films stick to what sells: Johnny Depp's face. Unlike its predecessor, a brand new Canadian poster for The Rum Diary sticks to what sells by focusing on Depp's funny expression and incidentally including some Palm Trees.
Almost a month ago, the first official domestic trailer for the ensemble drama Fireflies in the Garden debuted online and indicated that the film will contain plenty of heavy familial drama, with Willem Dafoe as a thoroughly abhorrent father and Ryan Reynolds as his grown-up son returning home for the first time in years. The trailer also suggested that despite the extensive dysfunctional horror, the film will contain some elegant visuals and ultimately hopeful moments.
A new poster for the film can't express quite so much, but it does feature a nicely melancholic image and the impressive cast lined up in a most presentational fashion. Naturally, Ryan Reynolds and Willem Dafoe lead the line-up, followed by Emily Watson, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hayden Panettiere, and Julia Roberts.
An adaptation of one of author John le Carre's many spy novels, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy promises to be the sort of espionage film in which intelligent, paranoid operatives attempt, by means of deduction and subterfuge, to root out a mole in MI6. Basically, it's not the sort of spy movie in which a megalomaniac commandeers a nuclear weapon and lots of henchmen with terrible aim are easily dispatched by a suave secret agent. As such, the poster campaign has not involved heroic poses and guys holding guns. Instead, we've been consistently treated to the faces of awesome British actors rendered in Cold War era code. The latest poster is the second to feature the impeccable Gary Oldman as George Smiley, and this time he's looking right out at you.
Out of roughly seven billion people currently inhabiting the planet earth, Johnny Depp is, at the moment, probably one of the most famous. Thusly, when marketing a movie starring Depp, the obvious move is to plaster his face on every available surface, so as to inform the audience in no uncertain terms that Johnny Depp is, in fact, starring the movie. Though Depp plays the lead in The Rum Diary, the very first poster for the film does not simply sell itself on the actor's famous mug. Instead, newly-unveiled poster presents and striking, clever image that ties directly the predilections of Depp's character. It's good. It's very good.
The first poster for Young Adult, a dark comedy reteaming Juno writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, has made its online debut. It is exceedingly good and unsurprisingly clever. The film stars Oscar-winner Charlize Theron as an alcoholic writer of young adult writers who suffers from a crippling case of arrested development* and spontaneously decides to return to her small hometown in a quest to rekindle romance with her high school boyfriend, played by Patrick Wilson. That said ex-boyfriend happens to be happily married with a child proves to an issue, and she eventually stumbles into some shenanigans with another high school classmate, played by the comedic thunderstorm that is Patton Oswalt.
In keeping with the protagonist's occupation and general state of mind, the poster is made in a mock Sweet Valley High style, taking the "movie poster that looks like a book cover" concept and running with it so far as to include a a little price sticker and feature Reitman's credit as a Newberry-like gold stamp. Also, dig the illustrated quality of the image of Theron and how it tells you pretty much everything you need to know about her immediately.
A new poster has effectively gotten across the central idea of Real Steel. In the future, just nine years from, the classic sport of boxing, with its sweaty humans beating the hell out of each other, has been replaced by robo-boxing, in which metallic opponents take the place of flesh-and-blood pugilists. Hugh Jackman stars in the family friendly science fiction tale as Charlie Kenton, a former contender who lost his shot at the title when the robot-based version of boxing took over the world. As the more-or-less deadbeat dad is reconnecting with his young son, played by Dakota Goyo, the two discover an old model robot named Adam, and though Adam-bot was never meant to box, its ability to mimic human movement allows a shadowboxing Charlie to once again take a crack at the championship.
The new one sheet, which is here thanks to DreamWorks, conveys the relationship between Jackman and the boxing-bot quite simply, with both striking the same, "I'm ready to stomp some ass" pose.
Long before he threateningly cast spells at child wizards as Voldemort in the Harry Potter franchise, Ralph Fiennes was an accomplished Shakespearean actor. It's natural, then, that his first attempt at directing a feature film would be an adaptation of a play by old William Shakespeare. Based on the trailer for Coriolanus, though, he also made his first movie as a director an epic war film, visually channeling the likes of Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Seriously, watch that international trailer, which hit last week. Today, the Weinstein Company released the first poster for Coriolanus, with Fiennes as the title facing off against his nemesis, played by Gerard Butler. And they're both blood-red Kalashnikovs silhouetted onto their faces to make clear in no uncertain terms that this is a war movie.
Remember that series of six character posters from Contagion, the upcoming thriller from Steven Soderbergh and his The Informant! screenwriter Scott Z. Burns? You know, the ones featuring the famous faces of Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow and the thoroughly unnerving warning "DON'T TALK TO ANYONE. DON'T TOUCH ANYONE." All six were pretty memorable, but just in case you've forgotten and for the sake of efficiency, Warner Bros has gone ahead and combined all six into one convenient package. The new Contagion poster includes all six of those actors, plus a new tagline that may not be urgent as the last one, but is certainly no more comforting.
After actual years of wondering just when Red Tails, the WWII aerial actioner based on the experience of the real-life Tuskegee Airmen produced by George Lucas would finally hit theaters, Lucasfilm suddenly dropped a hell of a trailer a few weeks back, along with a a release date. Today, in equally unexpected fashion, a second trailer has debuted, along with the first one-sheet poster for the film, which depicts the struggle of the Army Air Corps' 332nd Fighter Group and 477th Bombardment Group to become the first African American pilots in U.S. military history.
This second trailer includes the drama, but focuses even more on the sequences in the sky, with the pilots of Red Tails engaging in some very exciting-looking dogfights and engagements with battleships and locomotives. The poster, similarly, highlights the action and heroics of an old-fashioned piloting adventure.
Just a few weeks back, we brought you the first official image of Gerard Butler and Souleymane Sy Savane in Machine Gun Preacher, the upcoming drama based on the true story of Sam Childers. Butler stars as Childers, a tough guy biker and unapologetic drug dealer who undergoes a dramatic spiritual awakening, leading him to become an unlikely hero for literally hundreds of orphaned Sudanese children forced to be soldiers in the Lord's Resistance Army, as he founded the Angels of East Africa rescue organization. Today, Relativity Media debuted the first official one-sheet for Machine Gun Preacher, and it gets across the determination of Childers with a simple, effective image.
