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Haidegger, Ingrid
Watch It!

Movie Posters as Marketing Tools and Genre Indicators.

Despite being mute, static, and one-dimensional, the movie poster manages to inform potential audiences of the rough content of a certain film and with one quick look encourages them to buy the ticket. The poster achieves this by strategically combining verbal and visual design elements. Depending on what film genre it advertises, titles, claims, taglines, release dates, studio logos, symbols, star images, and the like are presented in a particular light, layout, frame, setting, and color. This book discusses the forms and functions of these and other generic verbal and visual movie poster elements. It analyzes ten film genres and their preferred poster design conventions using a corpus of 250 popular movie posters of (mostly) Hollywood films produced between 2010 and 2015. The aim of this book is to thoroughly investigate the medium to highlights its importance both for distributors advertising their films and potential viewers interested in an exciting movie-going experience. Overall, the main goal of this book will be a synchronic evaluation of the movie poster and its design conventions to provide a detailed picture of the movie poster as a marketing tool and genre indicator, supported by a diachronic approach to the intricacies of film marketing strategies. For an effective analysis, the form and meaning of the movie poster elements will be contrasted with conventional advertising poster elements, historically contextualized, and compared within the chosen genre corpus. Before looking at the verbal and visual cues on movie posters, however, a few introductory paragraphs on the development of the movie poster as a medium itself, on film marketing in general, and on the advantages and problems of genre attribution in a filmic context will provide a solid basis for this analysis. 233 Seiten mit 33 Tab., gebunden (Film and Television Studies; Vol. 4/Universitätsverlag Winter 2017)