Mark It!

For all of you who have ever watched a movie in the last 5 years, would have noticed a new trend in Hollywood films – The over use of bright Orange & Teal.

Firstly, lets go back and look at a quick history of color.  With the use of color in painting for many years, the key to a striking image is the use of contrasting colours (or opposite colours).  If you’ve ever looked at a color wheel  – or even negatives from photos – you would notice that the contrasting color of the orange hues (like skin tones) is blue.

When colour was first introduced, the oranges and blues where so strong that they looked unnatural and jarring.  As colorization and color film progressed colors where made to look more realistic.  History, as it also does, has repeated itself once again with the new age of digital color grading – pushing it to the limit resulting in every person looks like they’ve just come out of a bad stray tan and live in a houses that are lit up like a nightclub bathroom.

You only need to look at the movie posters to see what I’m getting at. So here are a select few.

Tyler Perry (yes, that guy from Star Trek) makes movies for black people who go to church.  Which is perfectly fine.  Unfortunately his movies kinda suck except for the drag character that he plays, Madea.  That bitch is funny as shit!  Anyway, if you haven’t seen his movies just watch the trailers (isn’t that why YouTube was invented?) and you’ve pretty much seen the best bits.  The rest is just sad, mad, black (and beautiful) women moping around until they finally marry (and bone) the horny-as-fuck guy who’s been fixing their car for the last 6 months.

Anyhoo, since TP’s rise to total dominance within the urban filmmaking genre (suck it Spike Lee)…sorry, Urban is the category that Hollywood puts African-Americans in, even if they live in the ‘burbs…his films have basically been more and more about the Madea character and less and less about anything else (except that one about coloured women who want to kill themselves…probably because they were forced to watch a Tyler Perry movie).

The latest one is called Madea’s Big Happy Family and the posters are interesting from a “this is popular right now” perspective.  Interesting in that they’ve reduxed three posters from this years Academy Award nominees as well as one classic and…another film.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it’s genius counterprogramming or villainous bandwagon-jumping.

The Godfather/doGfather/Godmother

The Madea Bunch

True Grits

The King’s/Queen’s Speech

The REAL Black Swan (and Jim Carrey)

So, rather than make any real posters, just steal everyone else’s, ride the bandwagon and see if people will go and see your stupid fucking film.  This is what happens when people with no imagination are given a lot of money.  But, I guess, if Jim Carrey’s doing it it must be ok, right?  Yeah, didn’t think so.

If you like movie marketing, Then check out the Nominees and Winners of the 39th Key Art Awards. Every year honors are given for outstanding achievement in artwork and other promotional materials. Below are just a sample of some of the works from Last year. For More Check out keyartaward.com. All Posters can be found at IMPawards.com