Previous Post On the poster: I know this isn't the officially "launched" advertising poster, but it must have some degree of legitimacy; so it's fair to say that some art director and some art director's boss have said "Yeah, that's what we want to show our moviegoing public." Bad move. On the good side it conveys a few things to its target audience - there's an Avengers movie and these are the people in it and they'll be doing action stuff. And it uses a "proper" logo. On the bad side it looks like one of those naff DVD covers for a TV series where some intern has pasted together a bunch of images in photoshop to make a montage. In fact I think that's exactly what they've done. Look at where the light is reflecting on each of the figures. Also look at the focus - where each of these characters is coming from and going to, and then where our attention is supposed to be directed. Iron Man's flying right out of the poster and over my left shoulder. Cap's glaring at something I can't see off to the right of the poster, possibly the same thing the Black Widow is waving her legs at. Thor's heading up up and away in is staring at the moon. The Hulk's about to smash Thor, presumably for having his light shining from the left whereas most of the rest of the team are lit more-or-less from the right. And Hawkeye's about to shoot Cap in the back. There is no actual viewer focus. The bright colours drag attention away from the key thing, which is the name of the movie (in grey). I know this doesn't mean the movie's unfocused with different actors heading off in different directions, confused elements clashing, and a lack of understanding of the basic principles of the craft, but the poster doesn't exactly suggest competence and quality. It suggests "make do" and haste. Compare and contrast with Avengers vol 3 #25 and Avengers vol 1 #168. My niggle is that given a $100,000 budget for the movie couldn't they have used just a fraction of it to commission an original piece of work for a poster? Maybe Alex Ross?

It reminds me quite a bit of the kind of thing I'd see when I was working as an art director. The publisher was given access to all of our materials, which they forwarded to their marketing people (who forwarded them to an outsourced firm or two). They'd come back with stuff that was just horrible in the eyes of all of us who were actually working on the game. We were making a steam punk/decaying industrial world and they were producing accompanying materials with highly modern fonts and lens flare levels of shine. There's an art book out there filled with a bunch of my concept art for the game that I absolutely loathe... Not only is it laid out like a modern tech manual for Stark Industries latest works, with digital looking type floating over clean backgrounds, but it's so poorly laid out in general with bad composition for each page. The existence of the book was enough for the marketing team, obviously... whoever put it together probably had no idea what it was for and was following the most basic of instructions about what to include.

To some degree, I understand... I certainly didn't have time to oversee the game and also look after an expensive marketing campaign as well, nor do I have the experience to make me qualified to do so. However, it does seem that these massive entertainment companies are all too quick to put these materials into the hands of the least creative people.

As near as I can tell, this poster exists to sell the Avengers film to companies that want to be promotional partners... Toy companies, fast food companies, people making coloring books, whatever. It was likely assembled from various promotional photographs of the actors, and then any costume elements that were new or different enough were painted on based off of concept drawings. Then the whole thing was painted over to make it a more unified illustration.

It's actually fairly common these days, and if you look up recent movie posters you'll see that they're quite often awful while being extremely simple photoshop compositions with each actor cut out and pasted onto a background together. On some of these posters, it's clear that the camera angles do not match... On most of them, the harsh outlines and mismatched lighting make it clear to even a novice eye that these characters were not occupying the same space.

Major studios tend to be okay with this, for some reason. I suppose because it's cheap, it's fast, and it doesn't risk alienating any potential audience by featuring a "style" they could object to. When a film unexpectedly flops at the box office, people look for a reason. If the advertising materials are in any way unusual, people will often point to those. The film "Knight and Day" starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz did much less business than most expected last year. Hollywood pointed to the ad campaign, which featured stylized posters of character silhouettes in action poses, with "Cruise" and "Diaz" in a larger font than the title of the film. People argued that it must have flopped because they didn't show the actor's faces. This kind of thing leads, more and more, to the "floating heads" poster design. I can't even blame the marketing people for phoning it in if they're going to catch the blame for any miss if there's any possible difference in what they did. Why stick your neck out? Do the minimum that's expected and hope nobody notices anything original about your work.