The Ten Types Of Movies, According To Our Movie Posters
If you ever had a sneaking suspicion that movie posters have a lot of similarities with each other, Twitter user @leesteffen's thread about this phenomenon can validate that your hunch was indeed right. According to the thread, there are only ten types of movies, judging by the movie posters that are created to market movies.
The thread starts off with the blue and orange action movie, which makes good use of the two contrasting colors to draw your attention, and the raunchy "sexy legs" poster, which foregrounds a pair of legs front and center in the poster.
We also have the "blurry cop" genre, which entails a figure running down the street in thriller posters, and the "leaning couple" poster, a clichΓ© we've seen again and again in the marketing for romantic comedies.
Other common visual elements include the back-facing character, which seems to invite an aura of mystery, and the woman in the red dress.
Again, for action movies, we've seen many make use of a different color palette — an explosive combination of black and orange — while for certain dramas, it's common to see mists and bodies of water in the posters.
There's also the horrifying "eye" genre poster, mostly seen in horror movies, and the bright yellow movie poster trope, which, as movie poster artist James Verdesoto has pointed out, is very common for indie movies.
Of course, this list is not really meant to be exhaustive, and you can argue that there are still many other tropes that haven't been discussed in the thread. You can also argue that some movies do not neatly fall into the aforementioned categories. It is, however, more than evident that a lot of movie posters share these commonalities and it's also fun to point out that poster artists, whether unconsciously or not, have certainly created some quirky poster tropes over the years, such as this, the Tom Cruise profile movie.