This reminds me of the time I begged my dad to get me a Harry Potter bootleg from some guy at the Thanksgiving Day Parade (like a week after the movie premiered). When I put it on, it was just a camcorder recording of the movie trailer on someone’s tv with some people fighting in the background 😭
i'm not sure how people don't understand this is the result of streaming services and how online search works on TV's nowadays.
we have 3 different Spiderman movie franchises at this point in the last 20 years, and most normies don't have a clue which is which. Spiderman 2? The Amazing Spiderman 2? Spiderman Far From Home?
they will however know if they see Tobey McGuire's face which series they are watching.
just like how if you go look up the Harry Potter movies, they have the number on the poster because not everyone can remember that the 4th movie is Goblet of Fire and the 6th movie is the Half Blood Prince.
I mean, I kinda get it in the case of movies with subtitles instead of numbers, because most people aren't gonna remember the actual order.
But like, this poster has the number of the movie and the date it's from, and I feel like that's enough information to figure it out or google it.
Like, I know it's the "there's a significant amount of overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest people" type of consideration, but like, if someone can't open the trashcan and leaved their trash on the ground that's bad for the environment; if people can't be bothered to figure out which movie they're about to watch, or in some cases pay to rent, there is only a consequence for them. And I think maybe we can have nice posters and let some people figure it out.
That's understandable. it's from within the last week or so. Sony updated the posters for all the spider-man movies on digital storefronts/streaming platforms
I'm not saying this is good, but it's so very casual streamers can tell which movie they are watching. The original poster doesn't give a low informed customer much clue about which of the like 10+ Spider-man movies they are watching.
The idea of you father thinking it's a direct continuation of the last movie with McGuire and being left with that conclusion up to right now due to your ambiguous reply is sending me. 😆
I think my dad just lost the ability to retain new information in like 2006. He got laid off literally 24 hours after signing on a 30 year mortgage he couldn’t actually afford and he’s just kinda been confused and out of touch ever since.
I thought the second poster was made by someone who was trying to prove a point that movie posters are shitty nowadays due to the Endgame effect😭No way that poster is unironic its horrendous
Holy shit I saw those like 10 different times on social media and everytime I thought the source was just that someone made them for the memes, like "shit was better before, imagine old poster with MCU posters style".
Never ever thought that it was something official.
Wait thats an official poster? The bad cropping on the venom spider man made me think this was just someone making an example of what spider man 3 poster would look like in modern time
Disney+ also has a bunch of posters that are much less interesting than the original ones. I especially hate the ones that have just the main character/characters in front of a basic background
So the real answer is that this style is much more popular in asia.
I worked for a mobile game company, and our marketing always had to be clean for America and Europe, but wildly busy, with as many character faces as possible, for the Asian market.
That's what shat happened and why posters are now just a series of faces and colors. Different markets respond differently to design.
It's only been used on streaming services. And even then services tend to use onenof many options depending on which one it thinks will make you watch.
It's called a Floating Head Poster, they were very common in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Some of the most iconic Movie Posters of All Time were Floating Head Posters.
People just wanna blame marvel for stuff cause it's huge and popular.
Also... i haven't seen that many floating heads type posters... i'm guessing specifically BECAUSE Endgame did it and that was like, the final stage of it. So now it's more minimalist stuff like the Backrooms poster or that other one i can't remember now lol... Feed?
This is what they're all trying to replicate but because the stars have egos (or contracts with egos) everyone's gotta be on the poster at the same size and position like they fight about the names on posters so now we get the BS version that's like fighter game selection screen.
And also, like someone else said, so people who can't or won't read know who's in the movie they're about to watch because mainstream stream users or moviegoers just want dopamine and don't read up on plot or cast beforehand.
This is basically it. Everything, and I mean everything you can possibly imagine related to a movie is negotiated by the studio and an actor’s agent, included the order of their name on a poster and how prominent they are on it.
And that’s a huge part in why the floating head poster style became in fashion - the marketing team wasn’t/isn’t privy to those aforementioned decisions until late in the game, so the floating head design made it really easy to update the poster as needed.
“Sharon Stone got her name first? No problem. Oh, now Dustin Hoffman’s head gets to be bigger and center stage ? Got it. Poster will be ready this afternoon.”
This type of flexibility just isn’t possible with better posters like what we used to get from Drew Struzan (RIP).
The point isn't debating the quality of the poster, the point is that the format and layout of the poster isn't some new, marvel, endgame enshittyfication. Yes, the one above is clearly shitty, and I don't particularly like marvel, but acting like it's endgames fault is rediculous
There's nothing wrong with the floating head design if done well. Marvel just half asses all their posters. Marvel has an entire roster of artists and of Art going back almost 90 years and they still half—ass their film posters.
If the floating head was done well (like the Struzan star wars art) people wouldn't be complaining about it.
Tbf one of the major problems with MCU posters is that every single hero has their mask off and gawks in the distance. The poster on the left is all about Spider-Man whereas the other one is Tobey Maguire looking into my soul
I mean, on top of this, ROTJ has new posters and 'covers' from 1995, 1997, 2004 and multiple later re-releases, a lot of which would look like a downgrade compared to this poster, too -- if you put up the same meme with the 1983 poster and 2004 DVD cover, it's the same trend as this but nobody would be blaming Disney or Endgame. Home video covers are usually a downgrade from a movie poster unless they reuse poster art but it's an old trend.
there are things going on in all of these classic star wars posters beyond just the characters, and more importantly they actually look good. there's an art style to them rather than than the characters just being what look like screen shots from the movie
Unhappy about parts of it, not all, it could have been so much more. I was a big Venom fan at the time and they made a mockery of him is mostly the reason.
When I was a kid, spider-man 3 was my favourite because I really liked how the symbiote costume looked, but now.. 3 is still my favourite just because of being the most fun to watch, even though the story/plot is nowhere near as well put together as the other 2
Not that this isn’t terrible since its apparently real, but movies have since a pretty long time had multiple posters afaik. Usually there’s some more stylized, and at least one with the entire main cast on it. The style of the latter has been getting used more as far as I can tell, probably especially with marvel because a selling point of the movies is which heroes are in them.
I very much prefer posters do the more artistic thing, but when it comes to marketing iirc it is pretty important to show off the cast properly. Or I remember reading about research they did many years ago, which is the reason you don’t see a lot of truly stylized posters anymore.
If you look at all the other movie posters it becomes clear. They’re trying to more easily differentiate which movie is which. Most of the old posters look interchangeable. Doesn't show which actor played Spidey, doesn’t show villains in most cases. The new version is bland and ugly but it does quickly and visually show you which movie you’re clicking on.
My favorite is when theres a black person they have to remove them for the version that gets released in China. And everyone treats china like their old crazy grandpa "haha you old scamp at it again.".
Only one I can think of is the Force Awakens trailer where they removes Jon Boyega, and how he stopped working for a perfume company because they removed him from their Chinese ads for a white(? Maybe Chinese i can't remember) actor despite him being the spokesperson
It looks like they left a space for Harry Osborne in the top left and edited him out due to James Franco’s allegations and didn’t bother restructuring the poster
I heard somewhere that the floating head posters are a result of many mig stars having a clause in their contract saying that their face needs to be on the poster. So once enough big stars are in the movie these kinds of posters become inevitable.
It's because they want to put all of the big named actors into the poster to make people want to see the movie. Meanwhile the old poster was aura farming.
That happens a lot, sadly. Lots of movies with great posters ended up with a half assed Photoshop job thrown together in 5 minutes for a release on dvd and so on. Check out the original poster for Zardoz, for example, then the laughable dvd and VHS covers
This crap is to help people who are trying to find the right Spiderman movies now that there have been 3 different Spiderman franchises in our life times. Just last week my sister in law was looking for Spiderman 1 with Tobey in it and she started watching Homecoming first before realizing it wasn't it. They are catering to the people who don't know anything about the movies.
I suspect the poster is to work better for streaming services. It shows which actor to immediately tell you which series it is a part of. So from a UX perspective I imagine it is much better for casual users that didn't grow up with the toby movies
I mean tbf the one on the right is pretty much just movie posters nowadays. The one on the left is back when movies cared and you'd get posters with actual creativity behind them.
Isn't this more the "star-warsification" of movie posters.
I'm curious what would the difference between the two be. Cause this looks like the trend star wars started first to me. (even if it started before the spiderman 3 movie orginally came out)
It's really the Star Warsification. The poster for A New Hope is probably the most famous movie poster of all time. Makes sense that uninspired designers would just copy it.
My dude, they’ve been making shitty posters like this since the moment Photoshop got cheap, Endgame didn’t even remotely popularize this kind of thing.
I mean, I get it, people who haven’t seen a single piece of media made before 2012 have to pathologically blame everything they don’t like in movies on Marvel. But this is beyond low-effort.
They need to differentiate it with Tom Holland trilogy that just released. Hence why they unmasked spidey to show Tobey and the female lead is not Zendaya
Totally agreed on the downgrade, but a lot of movies do not and have not had their poster art used for home video for decades. All the classic "Star Wars" had different VHS covers in 1995 and 1997, DVD covers in 2004 and 2006, etc. that did not use the classic poster art. The "Jurassic Park" VHS and DVD covers were different and then the later reissues also had different art, including some Photoshop-looking garbage later on. The VHS tapes and DVD art for Disney films were often distinct. "Godzilla" films -- in 1998, Simitar did original art, then 2002 Classic Media and the 2004 Sony DVD releases of various "Godzilla" films separately used entirely new and distinct Photoshop work, and poster art was only changed back to later once the original Japanese edits entered circulation.
I've also seen some TV shows change their streaming art annually as a way to 'signal' to people there are new episodes available, in some cases using posters tied to a specific season or art created only for the purpose. Back to movies, "Harry Potter" has had those numbered poster art versions on streaming for years and years, but not sure that art was ever used for home video.
It feels a little easier to count the movies, like Raimi "Spider-Man" and the Paramount era "Friday the 13th" films, that actually DID stick with their poster iconography.
Look man, the idea of making all the Spider-Man posters consistent is very cool, but why the fuck they did the shittiest job possible, like damn, those posters are completely awful
You guys are getting mad about this now? The Raimi Spider-man movies have been getting awful box art for years at this point. At least someone sat at a computer to make that garbage, they did this box set on their phone.
The first poster was for its theatrical release over 25yrs ago. Tons of money was spent on marketing and there were 2 movies before so everyone knew what “Spiderman 3” was and who was in it. So you could make the movie poster show none of the stars and have it be more themed. That poster was perfect for that moment in time.
Now it’s decades later. There’s been two different Spiderman runs of movies after that original one.
No one young who isn’t a Spiderman fan will have any idea who starred in the original Spiderman movies. They might even confuse Spiderman 3 with the current movies. So the studio decided to make it clear who was in those movies, so if someone rents or buys it online, they know what they are getting.
Edit: To add even more, it also helps the people who see Spiderman No Way Home. If they decide after “hey I wanna see the Spiderman movies with that old actor”, they can easily find him on the poster.
You just have to understand that you’re either a bigger Spiderman fan or you’re old .. old enough to see the original run of the movies and not the target for these posters.
‘Post-MCU’. I have bad news for you about movie posters going back to the 1930s. I understand that this may be hard for you to understand, but almost nothing that sucks about Hollywood was invented or popularized by Marvel.
I mean, you can’t really deny that we’ve had more of those posters post-mcu. I don’t mean putting a couple actors in the poster, I mean making a poster with literally nothing besides faces. Though star wars did it first, I implore you to look at the marvel movie poster lineup and tell me that they haven’t been at the very least contributing to the issue
When they do these dumbass slop posters, I just have to wonder what kinda guy they're imagining who looks at the first and goes "pass, looks boring" and then at the second "hoOOOOOOoly shit".
No it doesn't. In fact it's like the last thing that needs to be scrutinized in the entirety of human existence. It's a movie poster for a 25 year old movie.
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u/qualityvote2 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
u/Rule_Ct_5293, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...