9 Movie Posters Clearly Designed by People Who Have Given Up
A few months ago, we implored Hollywood to take a little money from their "diamond straws for snorting cocaine" budget and use it to hire better poster designers, please. Unfortunately, not only have movie posters managed to get even worse since then, but the TV industry has started commissioning their promotional art from the same 12-year-olds who just learned how to use MS Paint, too.
At this rate, by the end of the year, the lobby of your local cinema is gonna be covered with stick figures and blank sheets of paper ... which would still be an improvement from posters like these:
The Lottery is About Eating Baby Feet
So your show is called The Lottery. How do communicate to potential viewers that the plot is more exciting than "a lady draws numbers from a fishbowl and reads them out loud?" We don't know the answer to this conundrum, but we're confident that it's not "disembodied baby feet":
That's right, cannibals. You're next.
Dear God. Where is the rest of the baby!? Wait a minute. Those can't be real feet, it's got to be some shitty Halloween prop. If they were real baby feet, they'd look like this:
And you definitely wouldn't wear a suit. Nothing gets baby out.
Again, this is supposed to be a poster for a futuristic Lifetime drama, not an ad for some morbid pro-life organization or, like, a supermarket for spare doll parts (which would at least explain the barcode). It's a show that would explore the idea of an infertility crisis and how it would affect humanity, which sounded like an interesting idea eight years ago when Clive Owen starred in it. We'll never know how bad things would have gotten for the dystopia that was The Lottery, because it was cancelled in mid-October after just one season.
"So people don't like disembodied infant feet. Good to know."
To set the scene, we present you the only possible conversation that could have led to this particular poster:
"So, what's this show about?"
"It's a bunch of doctors who work The Night Shift at an ER -- I mean, uh, emergency room. Not ER."
"OK, and ...?"
"And they're sexy, and there's drama between them. Sexy drama."
"Fuck, that's every doctor show ever. How do we market this shit?"
"Eh, just throw a guy in a bike somewhere in there."
"We did it! The first leg/motorcycle transplant is a success!"
Let's analyze what's going on here. There are two groups of people in this shot: first we have the ones who are concerned because you can't drive a motorcycle inside a hospital lobby ...
"Dammit, Harley, you loose cannon! That's what the cafeteria is for!"
... and then there's the group that's clearly looking out at something even more shocking than a guy riding a motorcycle in the middle of a hospital.
"Holy shit, it's a guy riding two motorcycles."
As if to compensate for the unbearable mediocrity of the show itself, it looks like all of The Night Shift's posters are fucking bonkers:
This episode deals with them having to reattach the doctor's penis after the logo tears it off.
Interesting that in both this scene and the previous one, the only thing indicating that anyone went to med school is the stethoscopes -- which is exactly what someone would wear if they wanted to pass for a doctor. Where are they rushing off with that gurney, anyway?
Wait, we had it all wrong. This is actually a show about a bunch of maniacs coked up out of their skulls who break into a hospital with a bike, steal a patient, take him up to the roof and throw him at a helicopter. Ugh, seriously, when will they stop ripping off ER?
The Major Crimes Detectives Are Very Confused About Where They Are
OK, it's starting to look like it's just impossible to make a poster for an ensemble drama that doesn't end up looking completely stupid. Case in point:
Major Crimes Motel sounds more like an FX show.
Major Crimes is a show about murder investigations, but the biggest mysteries here aren't related to the clear-cut case of the drunken dude who tried to dive into an empty pool at night and broke his neck (which really shouldn't take nine detectives to figure out). For starters, what's with the old guy in the fishing cap? Is he A) grumpy because he had to leave his vacation to deal with this murder bullshit, or B) just at the age where people get super confused and need other people to help them get dressed?
Wait, no, we saw this episode: it's the one where he gets gum in his hair before his big presentation.
Then, of course, is the lady in the full dinner gala get up, who looks extremely out of place in this scenario -- everyone knows you don't wear heels to a pool party. Fashion faux pas aside, we're worried that she doesn't seem to be treating this case with the same seriousness as her male counterparts.
"You guys let me know when you need a sassy retort, I'll be waiting right here ... not policing."
However, none of this is as alarming as the fact that they're apparently letting two high school kids hang out right in the middle of a crime scene:
Actually, we're pretty sure these two just wandered off from the set of a CW soap.
Cedar Cove Turns Andie MacDowell Into an Escher Drawing
Hey, did you know that Andie MacDowell still exists? The Hallmark Channel would really, really like to remind you that she does:
The other guys, not so much.
If your nose started bleeding immediately after you laid eyes on that picture, don't worry: that's just your brain self-destructing after attempting to understand the spatial configuration of that place. Let's assume that Cedar Cove's characters are standard humans and not shape-shifting aliens out of Da Vinci's nightmares. Andie MacDowell's head should be about the same size as everyone else's, right? Well ...
Hrm, that doesn't look right. But upon closer examination, that railing stops at everyone else's knees. And that railing certainly seems to be a simple curve going around her pals back there. Maybe they are on an elevation? Let's try another test. Her wrist is about the same size as that railing, so we'll use that for scale instead.
We'll get to the bottom of this, dammit.
Looks about right, let's look and see how ...
Aghhh! So what we've learned from this is that Andie MacDowell is either deceptively short, deceptively tall, or an impossible being from a higher dimension. Just goes to show that you can't make out with a demi-god like Bill Murray without some freaky side effects.
What the Hell is Wrong with Colin Firth's Face in Magic in the Moonlight?
Magic in the Moonlight is a quirky romantic comedy that features zero disturbed serial killers. We can't say the same for its poster, unfortunately.
You know you've got a problem when the words "Woody Allen" are only the second creepiest part of the poster.
Before moving forward with this one, there's something we gotta fix...
Better. Outside of the state of Texas, hats are not supposed to be that disproportionate to head size. Now onto the bigger problem: Colin Firth's Photoshopped features. Forget whatever it is that stoned Emma Stone is preoccupied with, Firth looks a bit ... off. Maybe if we help him raise his head, he won't look like he's suffering from a cervical strain in his neck and oh God that just made it worse.
What's up with his eyes? Look at them:
One of them is a weird bit higher than the other. His nose is aimed straight ahead, but it's like his eyes got twisted partway around. It's Photoshop gone Addams Family.
And speaking of rom-com monsters ...
My Man is a Loser and Hit by Lightning Are the Stuff of Nightmares
At first glance, the poster for My Man is a Loser looks so boring and generic that most people probably won't give it a second one. The producers were probably counting on this, though, because of the Cronenbergian body horror that hides within.
"My Man Lisa Loser?
John Stamos looks normal, if disturbingly un-aged from the last time he was culturally relevant. But if you look closer, you'll notice that he's the only one of the men with proportionally sized body parts. Check out the other two guys -- not only do their heads look all awkward, but it's like someone removed large sections of Left Guy's arms and surgically attached them to Right Guy.
What Frankenstein shit is this?
Now let us talk about the Jon Cryer comedy Hit by Lightning, because someone in the world has to at some point:
The lightning strike fried away all three of Cryer's body hairs.
Again, pretty generic ... until you notice how Will Sasso has stopped existing in three dimensions. Look at how he's sort of tucked under Cryer's left shoulder, which is attached to a bicep the size of Sasso's entire face. We refuse to believe Ducky went on a bodybuilding binge, so we have no idea what happened here. But let's say Sasso is actually under the sheets and not just Photoshopped in. Here's where the natural extensions of his body would go:
Which explains why they're making those faces.
Oh man, check out how badass the new Mad Max looks!
"Now with 100 percent less anti-Semitism!"
Look at that stoic determination, that total inability to give a shit about his surroundings. Cars crashing around him? Big deal. But if you flip it ...
Suddenly his expression went from "dropping fools" to "dropping a deuce".
This simultaneously makes more and less sense than before. The chain at the now-top of the poster is floating down, trucks are inexplicably veering upwards and fighting gravity, and what is Max doing? Apparently waiting for some rain to fall so he can start tonguing Mary Jane, because if he's not Spider-Man, then what the hell is he supposed to be holding on to?
And what's with the pinata in the background? Is it his birthday?
A lot of things about TAK3N don't make sense, starting with the fact that it exists. This poster probably takes the cake:
This tells us a few things about the movie right away:
1. It takes place in Los Angeles.
2. There's a virus that turns random letters into the number three. Presumably, Liam Neeson tracks down and murders the virus.
3. This shit is gonna be even dumber than you imagined.
But wait, there's a whole other level of stupidity that you might be missing here. If Neeson were to walk past the big "3" and look at the sign from the front, what he'd see is ...
"Hellywood"? We're assuming this means Neeson's character actually died at the end of the first movie, and the rest has been the devil forcing him to repeat the same plot over and over as penance.
Conservatives love to talk about the "War on Christmas." Kirk Cameron is done talking.
Everybody fucking run! Kirk Cameron's got the Palantir from Lord of the Rings, Baby Jesus and his parents are trapped inside, and he's going to beat us to death with a candy cane! Son of a Blitzen, what's going on here?
Well, judging by the cross on the left and the bottom of the man's size 15's, we're looking up at him. We're about to be curb-stomped in the middle of an anti-Santa tornado Into The Storm-style.
Look closely ...
What's that in there?
... OK, now we really wanna see this movie.
And for a few reasons why Saving Christmas will probably make 42 dollars at the box office, check out Why Every Christian Movie Bombs in a Mostly Christian Nation.
