Movie Posters

This week I'm going to talk about the rhetoric of a couple of movie posters, because I'm in a movie mood right now.

The first one is the poster for Jackass: The Movie, since I'm also in a Jackass mood!

First of all, what a fun picture!  A bunch of guys crammed into an over-sized shopping cart racing down a hill being followed by a huge explosion.  This poster is basically promising fans that the movie will be a bigger, better version of the television show.  The shopping cart does this because anyone who watched the show knows they often ride around in them.  In the poster, they are literally in a bigger and better shopping cart than a real one.  Next, the explosion is huge, and bigger than anything they would have been able to do with the show, so once again, they are making promises of new and more exciting stunts.  It also has the recognizable "jackass" in all white written at the bottom, but written in red over top it says "with stuff you'd never see on t.v." once again convincing the fans that if you like the television show, you'll love the movie.  I think this was important for the movie because I'm sure there were doubt that the show wouldn't work out in a movie format because it's comprised of short clips, which you may not expect to work for 90 minutes or so.  Overall, I think this poster does a great job in what it wants to express about the movie; it is just like the show, but with more exciting and crazy stunts, which is just what fans would want to see.

Poster #2: Valentine's Day

I haven't seen this movie, because I'm not particularly a fan of romantic comedies, but that's beside the point.  The main focus of this movie poster is the celebrities.  You look at it and see a heart filled with faces, so immediately the target audience (mainly women) is drawn in.  Upon further inspection, we see the words "From the director of Pretty Woman comes a day in the life of love."  The entire poster is focused on boosting the recognizable names.  Pretty Woman is an extremely well known romantic movie, so the poster tries to promise that this movie will be just as good as that one because it's the same director!  Then you look closer at the faces in the heart and realize that they are all extremely well-known and young faces in Hollywood.  You would be hard pressed to find someone that would not recognize at least one face in that group.  By doing this the poster is basically saying "Look at all the famous people we got to be in our movie, it MUST be good!"  All you really know about the movie is that it is about love, and it has a whole bunch of famous actors and actresses, but I think it works to get the target audience interested in the movie.

These movie posters are extremely different from one another, but both work for their different purposes.  The Jackass poster promises its fans that there will be more action than there was in the t.v. show, and therefore way more fun.  The Valentine's Day poster was released on Valentine's day, so many people were already looking for a romantic movie, and this poster claims to be the best by promoting all of the famous stars that it has.