There is no such thing as a bad movie poster. Or, for that matter, a good one. There’s a lot we can disagree on when it comes to film one sheets, but almost every publicist, designer, archivist and filmmaker can agree on this: poster-making is an art that’s unable to be defined by the binaries of “good” and “bad”. Here are some more useful words: emotional, beautiful, memorable, confusing, unusual, mold-breaking, tempting, effective. Much like the films they advertise, posters carry a different impact depending on who they’re designed for.

We know this: a lot of film lovers have a deep connection to their collectibles. You might be familiar with one obsessive film nut who’s been collecting his favorites since the 1970s. “The posters promise something. They really do. A special dream.” These are the words of Martin Scorsese in Richard Schickel’s Conversations with Scorsese, offering possibly the most heartfelt explanation as to why we have grown to care about these sheets of paper as much as we do. “You can’t possess the film because you didn’t make the film, and you can’t possess the moment that the film was projected,” says Scorsese. “It’s like chasing a phantom.”

And so the poster is the material manifestation of these phantoms: a memento of the cinematic experience; a token that lasts beyond the rental expiry. Film posters are, to an extent, immortal. They exist in my favorite category of things: that rare type of object that, once owned, will outlive us. Alongside cookbooks, novels and little wooden mementos, they won’t run out, pass their use-by date, or disappear into dust (until they return to the earth, literally speaking).

And yet, because we experience them frequently on handheld devices, today’s movie posters also need to stand out at smaller sizes, not least so they pop in the Letterboxd app. In an increasingly segmented world, with the persistent remnants of a pandemic and an ever-widening gap between blockbuster and independent films, how can anyone feel confident committing to a poster design? One that will stand the test of time and end up framed above a mantelpiece? In my efforts to chase the phantom, I went to experts across the globe: designers, publicists, a dealer gallery… and my own parents.

‘Movie poster designer’ hasn’t always been such a coveted career. In fact, some of the most talented designers working today kind of just fell into the job, before slowly coming to understand just how beautiful a vocation this could be. Akiko Stehrenberger, whom you might know as the artist behind Jessie Buckley’s suspended-in-time snow-seat for I’m Thinking of Ending Things, only started all this because she was in debt at the turn of the millennium.

“I needed to pay off my student loans and the debt I racked up while living in New York during and post 9/11,” she tells me. “My intention was only to do it for a few years until I got out of debt. I had a really hard time in the beginning because I naïvely thought there was no ‘art’ in advertising. But many years after I started making movie posters, I was in Madrid and saw an Alphonse Mucha exhibit. I looked at his work and saw how much he brought art into advertising and it really helped me get over my struggle.”

“I definitely had to fight very hard to get my freedom,” Stehrenberger admits. “There were many years where I just had to sort of be a ‘yes’ person to get my posters in the race with the other gazillion posters being presented for the same project.” But the tide is turning: “I feel clients have changed tremendously. They’re realizing a piece gets more attention if it’s not something you see every day, and cuts through the noise.”

That originality is what every designer strives for—and it’s every publicist’s tricky job to make it fit into the required mold. Courtney Mayhew, an international film publicist and the managing director at Ahi Films in Auckland, has worked on more than 500 films, led countless gallery shoots (a photo shoot specifically for poster design) and chaired difficult conversations with filmmakers, designers and distributors about creativity and curbing certain approaches.

“I’ve worked on films where we’ve loved the first poster—I’d buy it and put it on my wall—but it’s the wrong one,” says Mayhew. “The risk with posters is alienating one part of your audience for the sake of a bigger audience. It kills me.” The risk Mayhew refers to is, in effect, the suspension of disbelief, the challenge to just go with a poster that’s not really making things easy for the audience. “Some people are design-obsessed and want it to look cool, but then that actually sometimes puts off a whole trove of people because they don’t understand what they’ve been signaled to about the content of that film,” she explains. It can be a good work of art, a gorgeous work of art, but that doesn’t make it the right poster.

To put this to the test, I sought out two of the most intelligent, thoughtful people I know—who also happen to not watch very many movies. The last film my mum and dad saw in cinemas was No Time To Die, with me (Dad cried). They’d been talking about going to see Elvis, but it hadn’t happened yet. I wanted to ask my parents about their take on film posters precisely because they’re not online, they don’t work in film, and they, to my eternal dismay, don’t really listen to all my recommendations. The perfect example of mainstream audience members.

When I ask them to remember the last time a film poster convinced them to go and see something at the cinema, both Mum and Dad tell me that has never happened. “A poster will draw my attention to the fact a film is coming out, but I’ll do my own research before deciding,” Dad says, shouting out the ‘Culture’ section of The Times. Mum says she’ll look out for actors or directors she recognizes—not faces, but names. Posters are triggers for my parents, a stepping stone for them to do the work before they buy a ticket. “I see the James Bond posters and that draws my attention because I like all the James Bond films,” says Dad. “It’s just a nudge that says, ‘The James Bond situation has a new film out.’ I’ll go and see it, whether the poster is good or not.”

Beyond that point, there are a few design approaches. The likes of Stehrenberger and Bennett will come up with something singular after drawing their own conclusions from seeing the film, or a studio will take a touch more control and provide sketches and moodboards (as well as stills) to an in-house designer. It all depends on the team, the time and the wildly variable amounts of cash. “The client will always want to sell and position the film a certain way and you have to accept that, but how you present emotions conveyed in the film is completely down to you,” says Bennett. Stehrenberger adds: “The majority of the time I come up with ideas based on what I take away from the film. Every now and then I receive a direction but within that, I try to push a little outside those lines when I can.”

What designers want to avoid, and which audiences are often savvy to, is what Stehrenberger calls “a paint-by-numbers, soulless piece”. She explains: “I pride myself on my ideas just as much as my painting skills. I don’t like taking on projects where the idea or composition is already locked. Half my job is guiding clients into doing something I feel works better.” What often works better, when a studio is brave—and has the cash to mess around and find out—is an approach that was popularized circa 2010 when Darren Aronofsky and team tried something different for the release of Black Swan. UK design studio LaBoca created four alternative posters for the ballet horror, none of which featured its highly recognizable lead, Natalie Portman. Certainly more of a risk, but it worked—Black Swan was a box-office surprise hit (and what ornaments those posters are).

That kind of leap of faith from the key, mainstream poster towards something alternative and conceptual is how you get a collectible gem like Stehrenberger’s breathtaking painted silhouette of two lovers for NEON’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire campaign.

Back to the parent test. I wanted to show my folks an equal stack of posters I love and ones I’m not so hot on, because I fear the internet has broken my brain and the noise of Twitter has possibly guided my conceptions of “good” and “bad” a little too much. First, I present to them Stehrenberger’s Portrait piece. They like it a lot as a piece of art, but—and they haven’t seen the film—have no idea what’s going on. Mum sees “the mix of a woman and a bird” and Dad sees “fire”.

This exemplifies how much of a risk bolder pieces pose for box-office success, and why commercial film-poster design must make room for multiple versions—for film fans and casual cinemagoers alike—to keep their safety net intact. Adrian Curry, long-time Letterboxd member, Kino Lorber art director and MUBI film-poster columnist, thinks you can trace back the rise of the alt-poster to the ’00s, when “fan art” was becoming a whole new thing.

“I feel that commercial film-poster design hit a bit of a nadir in the ’90s, and then in the ’00s you started to see the rise of fan art or alternative movie posters,” Curry explains. “In recent years a lot of distributors, seeing the popularity of the fan-art poster, have commissioned an illustrated poster as a teaser, but then when the film is released they will often start using a more conventional design.”

“Who the bloody hell are all these people? It’s not dramatic enough. I would have had one man with a lightning bolt and colors.” That’s Dad, who adds he can see that the poster “says it’s a hero film with fighters and this, that and the other”. He agrees that it is generally effective, but he makes it clear that this poster, and therefore the film, are not quite in his wheelhouse. Mum’s not a fan either, suggesting the color scheme of blues and purples “says it’s a man’s film”, and adding that she thinks “the women look like token women”.

I found it quite telling that when asked what kind of film poster they would absolutely not design, both Bennett and Stehrenberger had similar answers. “I hate doing illustrated ensemble-cast posters,” says Stehrenberger, knowing full well that sometimes the issue is contractual, where certain projects simply have to feature a specific actor across a certain proportion of the marketing and in a certain number of stills to fulfill the deal.

“It is very rare that something like that can be infused with a great concept and feel fresh and new. I guess that gets me out of doing any Marvel posters!” Stehrenberger laughs, with Bennett adding: “Starting off, you always have aspirations to design for the biggest clients, but there’s so many constraints and such a strong case of ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’. I can safely say I don’t aspire to make anything for a Marvel movie any time soon.” And even Mayhew, who must support and champion artists and salespeople alike, cannot stress how much she hates floating heads. Sorry, Feige.

In fairness, I do know my parents’ taste in movies and felt a little bad that I’d asked them to comment on the poster for a movie I know they would never really choose to go and see. So, I pull up the Elvis poster.

Mum just nods her head. A lot. “Totally representative of what the film is probably going to be,” she says of the rhinestones and glamor that advertise another starry Baz Luhrmann production. “I’m not sure if it represents Elvis’s life but it certainly shows his appeal, his glamor and his intensity. It doesn’t make me want to see it more, but I would have expected a poster like this for Elvis.”

Blockbusters aside, there is a small, perfectly formed two-hander from this year’s crop whose poster bothered me even while I held the film in my heart. Watching Good Luck to You, Leo Grande at this year’s virtual Sundance festival, I was bowled over by the incredibly original intimacy and low-key wisdom about human connection (where are you this awards season, Leo?). Crucially, I loved the delicate little cursive title treatment within the film itself. Upon release, however, a different kind of poster emerged.

This far into my research, I’ve come to accept that sometimes you do need to let your gorgeous little low-budget film use the blunt tools it has to hand to make money so that more gorgeous little low-budget films like this earn more money in future. Sometimes, you just need to accept an image of Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack half-undressed on the floor at the foot of a hotel bed and say thank you. The box office (healthy, handsome, thriving) speaks for itself.

And sometimes, often in fact, that box office speaks different languages and has different needs depending on exactly where you find yourself in the world (hello to you, Korean version of the Leo Grande poster, Emma in ecstasy on a wrinkled sheet). It’s not just about changing out the text to suit the local market; it’s about activating a whole different audience.

And on NEON’s key poster for the wider markets, we’re aboard the boat, which smokes while its megastars tan. Woody Harrelson takes center stage, various passengers and crew strangely Photoshopped in around him. All three of these posters tell the viewer it’s a satire of some sort, but the latter, released in August as part of a large push for the film’s October US opening, is clearly geared towards those who are late to Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s oeuvre: the arty mainstream.

Curry explains that the reasoning for having different posters for different regions can vary wildly, but that it’ll often come down to artistic traditions or political restrictions, as well as “the talents of specific artists”. He once more nods to the history of the art form as a primer on what might have happened in the past, to explain what we’re dealing with now. “Italy has a great tradition of painterly melodramatic realism, while in Poland artists would use surrealism to circumvent political censorship—or to cover up for the fact that they were often not able to see the films in advance.”

The aesthetic quality of a film poster aside, questions of its function, location and material form are all just as important. Stehrenberger admits her pet peeve is the assumption that a fan-designed poster is the same as the real thing, which Mayhew attributes to a misunderstanding of conventions. “You’ve got to have the rating, the billing block, the cast names. Good poster designers leave space for these things that go beyond the title,” she explains.

(We can leave the marketing fail—or happy accident, depending how you see it—of the subway posters for The Northman, which were printed without the film’s title, to one side, and embrace this omission as something that actually proved that any press can be good press if you have enough faith.)

But the most important thing, our resident publicist tells us, is your call to action. The sales tool to steer all sales. “You can’t go, ‘That looks cool… I don’t know what it is or where I can see it,’” Mayhew explains. “You need your call-to-action line to say whether it’s in theaters or streaming. Make it easy for the audience, otherwise they’ll move on.”

For designers, that call to action is what sends their art out into spaces they couldn’t otherwise reach, which gives them the greatest possible canvas. “The best part of the job is when you see your work somewhere that you don’t expect,” says Bennett, thinking equally of the brick-and-mortar possibilities of billboards, buses and buildings as much as the different countries around the world where beautiful art can end up—or a hugely popular IG grid you might spot your familiar colors on. “There’s always a sense of pride, even if the only part you created was the credit block.”

Digital spaces are a godsend in Mayhew’s day-to-day. In fact, she turns to Letterboxd to get inspired when designing a campaign. “I first search for a film that’s similar to ours, then I scroll to the genre tags and look at all the posters,” she says. “You’ll see a theme pop up and you’ll realize there’s a color scheme and other elements this audience is used to seeing. You pick a poster that had a successful campaign, and study posters similar to it.”

Exhibit A, your honor: the “purple/​red/​neon-blue sort of thing” that may have turned my parents off Avengers: Endgame but certainly works for plenty of others; the darkroom-red posters (bonus points for white text), that will give you the aching romance of In the Mood for Love as much as the bloodthirsty violence of Red Sparrow; the unnerving color scheme of heterosexual Christmas movies of the 21st century; the giant floating heads over fields. Sorry to our designers for these reductive takes, but it goes to show the visual shorthand that audiences have become literate in.

If we’re going off these undeniable trends and rules, do you have to fit in in order to stand out, then? “It’s standing out so it looks interesting, but fitting in so people know what it is. It’s such a delicate balance,” says Mayhew. The likes of Bennett and Stehrenberger (and Saul Bass and Bill Gold and many more before them) give us hope for originality, and for stubborn ambition in the realm of poster design, with audience-forward publicity and marketing folk like Mayhew fighting in the corner of designers and filmmakers as well. Having the guts to celebrate emptiness, to create unique typography, to illustrate live action—these are the artistic moves that get their work on our walls.

If you are serious about poster collecting (who could be blamed?), a trip to downtown Manhattan might be just the thing for you, to a little space that opened in 1995, which The Village Voice named “the best place to be reminded that all film art isn’t on-screen”. Welcome to Posteritati.

A commercial gallery with a curated collection of thousands of vintage and contemporary movie posters and ephemera from over 30 countries, Posteritati keeps those phantoms alive, the ones Scorsese dreamed about. “Everyone at Posteritati has a deep passion for movies, and that passion extends to the physical objects that connect us to the experience of watching movies,” gallery manager Stan Oh tells me when I visit.

WATCH: “LEtterboxd visits” takes A TOUR OF POSTERITATI.

A huge, sun-kissed window lights the room, adding a sense of calm as you flick through the two enormous physical stacks of quads and custom designs, and scroll through the digital catalogs containing an archive that feels endless. Beyond the social appeal (which is huge), Posteritati also plays a key role in connecting industry players so that they can keep track of things they love, and seek out inspiration to create something new. “Our owner Sam Sarowitz worked in film production in his previous life and so when opening Posteritati, it was natural for him to try to find ways to connect to the industry,” Oh explains.

“Now, with social media, merch and lifestyle branding becoming more and more central to how films are marketed, we’ve been seeing more and more opportunities to work with distributors and exhibitors.” There are other places to satisfy that physical-collecting itch, such as collection house Rock Paper Film, with a wide range of options on offer: the likes of Stehrenberger and Bennett have a space to showcase their work, Mayhew can browse for new campaign ideas, and Mum and Dad might really find something they finally want to put up on their walls. Maybe.

My visit to Posteritati raised more questions (does it ever end?) when thinking about the art of collecting, specifically. Much of the company’s work involves searching the archives for that rare gem, the one that didn’t get away when cinemas were casually disposing of last week’s one sheets without a second thought for the future nerd (or Martin Scorsese himself) who might like that print, linen backed and mounted behind museum glass, on their wall.

But more and more lately, distributors and picture houses are commissioning new artwork for old films, hoping contemporary designs will attract fresh audiences to their restorations and repertory seasons. It’s somebody’s job to specifically design posters for re-releases—raising the dead, effectively, but beautifully.

Dylan Haley is an independent graphic designer who specializes in repertory poster design. You might have spotted his recent work for Wayne Wang’s 1989 film Life is Cheap… But Toilet Paper is Expensive or Béla Tarr’s 1994 epic, Sátántangó, both released via Los Angeles-based film distribution company and restoration label Arbelos Films. For Haley, it’s all about the love of the art; he has a keen awareness that there’s very little point in doing it for the money, as there is little of that. “For a long time, it was just kind of a dead art,” he says of poster design and his work to bring these films back to life.

Much of the process is about honoring the style of the era while proving that there is a reason the film didn’t remain lost in its original era. “Arbelos cares about staying true to the film in the best way possible,” Haley says. “You want it to look like the ’70s, for example, while looking a little better than what was made in the ’70s. You have to put a new gloss on it.”

But are our experts collectors themselves? “My favorites change all the time,” says Oh. “The ones I have up in my apartment right now are Camera Buff, Danton and Rosemary’s Baby. One of the rarest posters I have is a French poster for Jeanne Dielman. I just saw an amazing poster for the movie Christiane F. that I’ve never seen before, that I’m trying to track down.”

Bennett currently has Lady Bird in his living room and Hereditary in his bedroom (“Who doesn’t love going to sleep with a haunting image of Toni Collette directly above you?”) and loves Vasilis Marmatikis’s poster for The Lobster almost as much as he loves TimeTomorrow’s one for Spencer. “It’s one of the first times I felt actual jealousy when a poster drops,” he admits. What about Stehrenberger, whose Portrait poster many could easily mistake for non-movie art, ready to frame in their homes? (Indeed, Mayhew has it in hers, floated on a black board to show off its frayed, painterly edges.)

“I don’t have one single movie poster hanging in my office,” she laughs. “Movie posters already consume too much of my life!” Still, like Bennett, there are some she wishes she’d designed herself, for a title that every one of my interviewees brought up separately (well, except Mum and Dad).

“I love the google-eyed teaser poster for Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Stehrenberger admits. “It has the wit and strangeness of the film without giving away the story and I was jealous that I didn’t make it!” Mayhew also loves this one, but acknowledges the risk in presenting it to a wider audience. “Filmies love it, and I love it. But it doesn’t signal everything that film could be to a wider audience.” When I show the poster to Mum and Dad, they kind of prove her point. “Far too busy,” Mum says. “You have to wince to understand what’s written.” Dad agrees, getting hung up on a few things beyond the monochromatic color scheme. “What does ‘everything everywhere all at once’ mean, anyway? It’s meant to make you inquisitive. This makes me think, ‘Whatever’.”

But Mayhew makes an excellent point on one of the many smart tactics the Daniels had when releasing their film, by putting forward three posters all as part of the main campaign: the googly eyes, the Michelle Yeoh-as-action-icon red poster (Mum and Dad started to warm to the film a little more with this one), and the glorious multiverse artwork designed by James Jean. “It has a vaguely ethereal look,” Dad says of this one, while Mum, who has not seen the film, just fully gets it: “I love the upside-down effect, which tells me this woman’s brain is not screwed up. Her world is possibly upside-down.”

Haley is sometimes worried about the homogenization of a shrinking film industry. Funding is dwindling, marketing has ever-changing needs. But we know for a fact that people still care. That’s as good a reason as any to keep going. “The film world is getting smaller and smaller, so we might as well make something we love,” Haley says. “There are better ways to make money than designing posters, so you might as well do something that’s going to put a smile on someone’s face, or stick around for a little while.”

From the light box to the back of the bus to the very app or browser you’re reading this in, film posters exist in spaces of all types. Letterboxd Patron members have collectively customized almost two million posters since our new choose-your-own feature was launched in September. The connection point will be different for everyone, but the result is often the same: a chance to possess, in some small way, a piece of a beloved film.

As the guy who loves movies more than anyone has said, “the only way you can try to possess films is to make your own films, but they don’t come anywhere near the films that influenced you or impressed you when you were in your formative years.” Our only option, then, according to cinema’s best friend, Marty Scorsese? “To try to capture something of them.”