Watch It!

Despite being mute and static, the movie poster manages to inform potential audiences of a film’s rough content and encourages them to buy the ticket after one quick look. The poster achieves this by strategically combining verbal and visual design elements. Titles, claims, taglines, release dates, studio logos, symbols, star images, and the like are presented in a particular light, layout, frame, setting, and color depending on which genre the advertised film belongs to. ‘Watch It!’ discusses the forms and functions of these and other generic verbal and visual movie poster elements. It analyzes ten film genres and their poster design conventions using a corpus of 250 popular movie posters of (mostly) Hollywood films produced between 2010 and 2015.