From Saul Bass to Drew Struzan to contemporary minimalism. A history of the marketing form that has shaped what audiences expect a film to look like before they have seen it.
The film poster is the most-public artefact of the film-marketing process. Almost every audience member encounters the poster before they encounter the film. The poster's specific visual register shapes the audience's expectations about what the film will deliver — and, in some sense, the poster's specific style shapes the cinematic landscape that surrounds it.
This essay traces the form's evolution from the silent era through contemporary minimalism.
The first significant film posters were produced for theatrical exhibition in the 1910s and 1920s. The form was, in early production terms, an extension of the broader theatrical-poster tradition that had developed for vaudeville and live theatre across the late 19th century. Most early film posters were illustrated rather than photographic — period print technology made photographic reproduction at poster scale technically difficult.
The early posters typically combined: a central illustration of the film's lead actor or actors, the film title in large typography, a brief tagline, and the studio's branding. The format was structurally stable for several decades.
The major mid-20th-century shift in poster design came from Saul Bass — the American graphic designer whose film-poster and title-sequence work for Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s established a new modernist visual register. Bass's posters for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Vertigo (1958), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Spartacus (1960), and West Side Story (1961) introduced minimalist composition, abstract graphic elements, and bold colour-blocking to the form.
What Bass did, structurally, was establish the poster as itself an artistic statement rather than as a marketing illustration of the film's content. His posters often communicated the film's tonal and thematic substance through abstract design rather than through depiction of specific scenes or actors. The technique allowed posters to function as art objects in their own right; many of Bass's posters are now in museum collections.
The 1970s and 1980s saw a return to painted-illustration posters, most-prominently in the work of Drew Struzan. Struzan painted the posters for the Star Wars original trilogy, the Indiana Jones films, the Back to the Future trilogy, the Harry Potter series, and dozens of other major releases across roughly five decades. His specific style — photorealistic painted portraits combined with multiple character poses and environmental elements — became, in some sense, the visual signature of mainstream popcorn cinema.
Struzan worked from production stills and photographs but painted from those references rather than tracing them. The result is a visual register that is recognisably composed — the figures are arranged in dramatic groupings that the actual film footage would not contain. Almost every blockbuster poster of the 1980s and early 1990s is, in some sense, in conversation with Struzan's working approach.
By the late 1990s and 2000s, the mainstream-studio poster template had converged on what designers call the 'floating heads' approach — a single composite image showing the film's principal cast in tight-cropped portraits, typically arranged in vertical or pyramidal composition, against a single dramatic background image. The template is reliable; it allows audiences to identify the major stars within seconds; it works at multiple sizes (the poster, the half-sheet, the digital thumbnail).
It is also, by general design-criticism consensus, visually inert. The template gives the designers almost no room for artistic expression; almost every contemporary studio poster looks like every other contemporary studio poster. The form has, in some sense, become a commodity.
The contemporary alternative to the 'floating heads' template is the art-poster tradition associated with A24 and other prestige distributors. A24's posters across the 2010s and 2020s have, almost without exception, refused the 'floating heads' approach in favour of single-image compositions, abstract illustrations, or photographic stills used as graphic elements. The A24 visual register has become, in some sense, a marker of the prestige-cinema tradition the company has cultivated.
Christopher Nolan's films have, since the early 2010s, used minimalist single-image posters that the studio system would not, by default, produce. The Oppenheimer poster (the silhouette of Cillian Murphy against the explosion's afterimage) is, in some sense, the contemporary art-poster ideal — visually striking, structurally clean, recognisable at any size. Nolan's industrial leverage has allowed him to insist on the alternative approach.
The film poster's structural function is to communicate the film's identity to the audience in a single image. The 'floating heads' template does this through star recognition. The Saul Bass tradition did it through abstract authorial argument. The Struzan tradition did it through narrative implication. The contemporary art-poster tradition does it through minimalist visual mood.
The form's continued vitality depends on directors and distributors with enough industrial leverage to refuse the default templates. The films that look most-distinctive on their posters tend to be the films that have insisted on their own visual identity rather than accepting the studio marketing department's standard approach. The poster is, in some sense, the first visible expression of the broader authorial argument the film will make.