Why Do Studios Keep 'Borrowing' Ideas For Movie Posters

20th Century Studios just released a new poster for The Last Duel, the new movie starring Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and several godawful goatees. Somehow this is actually a real thing that is coming out in honest-to-goodness theaters and not a fake movie set inside the Jay and Silent Bob-verse. 

But the poster, as noted by Slashfilm, bears a striking resemblance to a Game of Thrones poster by Martin Ansin, which was released by Mondo in 2012. 

This isn’t exactly an isolated incident, either. It seems as if we’re just getting more and more stories about posters for big-budget studio movies that have needlessly cribbed others’ work. Just a few days ago, it was reported that a new Venom: Let There Be Carnage poster seemingly copy-and-pasted part of the composition from a fan’s Deviantart illustration. Which is just … surprisingly lazy. We get that not every art school graduate is super-thrilled with the task of having to sketch a silhouette of She-Venom, but come on. 

Perhaps most galling were the character posters for 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, which seem egregiously copied from a line of Sony CDs by French artist Hachim Bahous, who was “flattered” but still, understandably, wanted to be “credited and paid” for his design.

It’s one thing to get ripped off, but it’s another to get ripped off by one of the largest corporations in the world. That’s like getting mugged at knifepoint by Richie Rich. In response to the controversy, Disney claimed that the posters “were created by an outside vendor and it’s something we are currently looking into.” But seriously, how does anyone think they can get away with this in the age of the internet? And if studios like Disney truly weren’t aware of the theft, couldn’t they have, you know, checked? They can make a $200 million dollar movie based on a dumb boat ride, but they can’t hire someone to do a reverse Google image search every now and then?

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Top Image: Sony