There was a time when the first encounter with a film wasn’t a trailer on YouTube or a meme-ified clip on TikTok. It was a poster. Painted, illustrated, alive with brushstrokes and imagination. You didn’t just see the characters—you felt them, larger than life, gazing out from bus stands, theater lobbies, or the cracked walls of small-town cinemas.
The golden age of movie posters was as much a part of film history as the movies themselves. Think of Drew Struzan’s work— the painter behind iconic posters for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Back to the Future.
Back to the Future (Drew Struzan, 1985)
Avengers: Endgame (Marvel Studios, 2019)
His Back to the Future poster remains one of the most instantly recognizable images in film marketing: Marty McFly frozen mid-motion, glancing anxiously at his watch, one foot already inside the glowing DeLorean. The orange sky swirls with painterly light, suggesting speed, danger, and time itself unraveling. It’s not just an ad—it’s an invitation into an adventure.
Now place that beside a typical Marvel ensemble poster: dozens of characters arranged in a pyramid formation, their heads floating against a stormy blue-orange backdrop. Every face is airbrushed to a uniform digital sheen, every expression locked in the same heroic grimace. There’s no mystery, no suggestion of story—only branding. It tells you who’s in the film, not what the film feels like.
Bob Peak, often called the “father of the modern movie poster,” brought a painterly flair to Apocalypse Now, where a fiery red sky and Brando’s brooding face became a surreal meditation on war itself.
Apocalypse Now (Bob Peak, 1979)
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)
Compare that to today’s war-film posters, which often rely on a desaturated still of soldiers running through dust clouds, the title stamped in bold block text. Peak’s poster was interpretive; modern ones are literal.
John Alvin gave us the glowing magic of E.T.—a tender, almost spiritual image of a child’s hand reaching toward the alien’s glowing finger, Earth shining in the background. Contrast that with today’s family-film posters: rows of CGI characters, all smiling or mugging at the viewer, the tagline slapped above. Alvin distilled wonder into one luminous gesture; today’s designs spell everything out, afraid of subtlety.
And horror? Roger Kastel’s Jaws poster remains a masterclass in terror.
Jaws (Roger Kastel, 1975)
The Nun (Warner Bros., 2018)
An unsuspecting swimmer floating on calm water, oblivious to the monstrous shark rising beneath—it created instant dread and made the film a sensation before it even premiered. Contrast that with recent horror posters: usually a shadowy house, a screaming face half in darkness, or the villain posed dead-center. Kastel’s image made you imagine the terror. Modern posters too often just show it.
And in other parts of the world, the artistry was even wilder. In India, massive hand-painted billboards turned cinema halls into temples of spectacle, with artists dramatizing faces, muscles, and melodrama in lurid color. In Poland, poster artists reimagined Hollywood imports with surreal abstraction—Alien as a grotesque insect, Star Wars as an avant-garde tangle of masks and myth.
It’s not that today’s designers lack skill. It’s that the industry has shifted away from posters as art, and toward posters as brand management. The Marvel and DC assembly lines have streamlined poster design the same way they’ve streamlined storytelling—consistent, recognizable, safe. Swap out the logos, and most posters blur together.
And that’s the tragedy. Hand-painted posters were imperfect, yes, but they carried personality. Sometimes a poster was even better than the film itself. For cinephiles, the poster was a souvenir of emotion, not just a sales pitch.
Maybe that’s why, in our hyper-digital present, there’s renewed fascination with retro poster art. Mondo prints sell out in minutes, collectors hunt for rare originals, and filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, and Nicolas Winding Refn still commission illustrated posters as homages to a lost craft. Independent films, too, sometimes break from the formula, experimenting with bold typography, hand-drawn imagery, and visual metaphor.
The blockbuster poster may have been standardized, but the longing for artistry hasn’t gone away. We still crave images that promise adventure, danger, romance, wonder. Perhaps one day studios will remember that the magic of cinema isn’t just what happens on screen—it’s also in the dreams sparked by a poster on a wall.
Until then, the old masters remind us: before the Photoshop layer mask, there was the painter’s brush. And sometimes, a single brushstroke said more than all the explosions in the world.
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