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What is a movie without its poster? More than just a bit of marketing, posters have evolved into an art form in their own right, showcasing the blistering work of the world’s greatest illustrators and designers with clever concepts, elegant artwork, and bold original ideas. In celebration of my personal appreciation of movie poster design and with the help of the extensive IMP Awards archives, comes our NOW That’s What I Call A Movie Poster! series, highlighting what I think are the best and most iconic movie posters through the years. The evolution of the movie poster began in the 1870s, when Paris artist and lithographer, Jules Cheret, introduced a printing technique that produced images with intense colour and rich texture. By the early 1890s, the streets of Paris were plastered with...

Movie posters are a powerful visual element that promotes a film’s themes and narrative. Movie posters for a long period of time were a significant part of the film industry and vital for advertising. Before the digital age, movie posters were important for circulating a film star’s persona and embodying a film’s cult status. The use of Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, major film stars in their day, are prime examples of how movie posters reflected star power. Cult films like Scarface and Night of the Living Dead with their dedicated fans, seek out movie posters as a way of owning part of their passion. However, could the movie poster become obsolete in today’s digital age. From the inception of cinema to television’s emergence in the 1950s, printed media was the domi...

As movies transitioned from simple moving pictures to a storytelling medium, their popularity drastically increased throughout the U.S. and Europe. As a result, they soon required advertising to alert people when and where they would be shown. The movie poster was born and has been used as a medium to promote films ever since with the commercial intent of getting people to buy tickets. When films were first shown they would be at amusement parks, fairs, and music halls and eventually in specially established makeshift theatres called Nickelodeons. A nickelodeon theatre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, circa 1910. Nickelodeons often used gaudy posters and ornamented facades to attract patrons, but bare walls and hard seats usually awaited within. Nickelodeons often used gaudy posters a...

After the National Screen Service (NSS) ceased most of its movie posters which they had stored in warehouses around the US and UK, ended up in the hands of private collectors and dealers. Today, there is a thriving collectables market in movie posters and some have become very valuable. The very first auction by a major auction house that consisted solely of movie posters occurred on 11th December 1990, when an auction of 271 vintage movie posters by Bruce Hershenson owner of emovieposter.com sold at Christie’s for $935,000. The highest ever recorded price for a movie poster was set on 15th November 2005 when $690,000 was paid for a poster of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis from Reel Poster Gallery in London. It has long been rumoured that purchaser of this poster was Leonardo DiCapri...

Madame Tussauds in London have for the first time put the wax figures of all six James Bonds, with five completely new wax 007s joining the existing figure of Daniel Craig. To coincide with the release of Spectre in 2015, Madame Tussauds put the complete line-up of Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig together for a period of six week prior to them embarking on a tour of Madame Tussauds locations worldwide. The wax recreations were created in close collaboration with EON Productions, the set gave fans the opportunity to stand side-by-side with all six Bonds - in the same place, at the same time. Madame Tussauds are encouraging guests to see how they measure up to each 007, pose with their favourite and take that stand out profile...

A circus is a company of performers who put on diverse entertainment shows that include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, unicyclists, as well as other object manipulation and stunt-oriented artists. The term 'circus' also describes the performance which has followed various formats through its 250-year modern history. Philip Astley is credited with being the 'father' of the modern circus when he opened the first circus in 1768 in England. Early circuses were almost exclusively demonstrations of equestrian skills with a few other types of acts to link the horsemanship performances. Performances developed significantly through the next fifty years, with large-scale theatrical battle reenactments becoming a s...

Before TV and radio, the main way of reaching the public was with large, eye-catching posters with theatres, silent film and opera advertising with bright colourful images fixed to walls or fences. Unfortunately over the years many of these images have been lost, destroyed or only ever found in very small single digit numbers, but Los Angeles based Century Guild a private museum and art gallery that specialising in the styles of Art Nouveau and Symbolism, has a selection of prints from the world of the peculiar and macabre. Some of these prints date back as far as the 1880s and come from countries such as Germany, Austria, France and Italy. The gallery owner, Thomas Negovan said “What I find most striking is the modernity of the visual message,” adding “We tend to view the turn o...

Robert McGinnis, at age 91, may not be a household name, but his book covers, movie posters, and “McGinnis Girl” femme fatales sure are. Meet the man behind some of history’s most iconic movie posters, From Breakfast at Tiffany’s to James Bond. Each month, the Men Who Are Thursday gather at a different member’s house amid the leafy streets of Greenwich, Connecticut. The men bring along brown-bag lunches; the host provides libations, hot soup, and dessert. The meetings, which started somewhere around 1969—no one’s exactly sure of the year—began in that ad hoc way such assemblages do, comprising an accomplished synod of artists and writers who, in the mid-20th century, had recast how America saw itself. At various points the brotherhood’s roster included co-founders David Burt, the sc...

When he was studying film at college, Peter Stults (left), an Illustrator and Designer from New York, used to come up with imaginary movie ideas and turn them into movie posters using a mix of Photoshop and collage. Fifteen years on, the New York-based graphic designer makes modern movies look like old classics of Hollywood's golden era in his What If series. The What If series was started in 2012 and asks the hypothetical questions movie buffs didn’t know they needed answers to. Such as, what if Cecil B. DeMille had directed Interstellar? Or what if Reservoir Dogs had been made at the height of the Rat Pack era? And most importantly, what would the vintage movie posters for these films look like if they had been made? People assume I don’t like modern movies – I do, but I am attrac...

On 6th June 1933, the first-ever drive-in movie theater, located on Crescent Boulevard in Camden, New Jersey opened. The cost was 25 cents per car and 25 cents per person, with no group paying more than one dollar. A drive-in theater (or as more commonly known in the UK, drive-in cinema) were incredibly popular in the USA between the 1940s and the 1970s. A Drive-In Sign Advertising River Of No Return in New York, 1954 Their peak popularity came in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly in rural areas, with some 5,000 theaters across the US. Drive-ins became an icon of American culture and a typical weekend destination not just for parents and children but also for teenage couples seeking some privacy. First Drive-In Theater in Camden, New Jersey, 1933 The drive-i...

A fascinating new book – Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art – has been released celebrating the first 100 years of black film poster art. A visual feast, these images recount the diverse and historic journey of the black film industry from the earliest days of Hollywood to present day. Accompanied by insightful accompanying text, a foreword by black history authority and renowned academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an afterword by acclaimed film director Spike Lee. Part aesthetic, part nostalgic, the posters have meaning to the young and old alike, and possess the power to transcend ethnicity. From early independents to 12 Years a Slave, these posters represent a journey: they remind people of the pioneers of the past, those courageous and daring African-American ...

It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about Sean Connery, Roger Moore or Daniel Craig, James Bond holds has a classic kind of cool that can’t be denied. While he’s been put beside some ingenious gadgets, iconic weapons and classic cars, it’s never been the toys that make the man. If anything, Bond has done more for product placement than it ever did for him. He’s the classic case of women wanting him and men wanting to be him (but also men wanting him and women wanting to be with him). Unless, of course, you’re a megalomaniacal villain. When the twenty fourth incarnation of the series Spectre arrived in cinemas, it marked the return of the man in the dapper suit doing what he does best: Beating down baddies, wooing the ladies, and generally making the world a safer place, all in service o...

A gallery that should bring comfort to any struggling young graphic artist is revealed; the movie posters that missed the final cut. We have curated a collection of the ones that got away, the rejected original draft versions of movie posters for some of the most famous film titles of recent decades, including Batman, Pulp Fiction, A Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist and Cool Hand Luke. The last three were the work of the unmistakable movie poster artist, Bill Gold, who over a 70-year career created movie poster images that helped to sell more than 1,000 movies. As a 21-year-old working in the advertising department of Warner Bros, Gold created his first poster for the James Cagney musical feature film Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942. Soon after he was asked to come up with a poster for one of...