Last updated on December 2nd, 2022
Everyone loves movies. We all love to watch movies for their unique ability to convey a story through powerful characters played by skilled actors. However, have you ever wondered, how much marketing efforts are required to drive the people to movie theatres? Or, What’s the first thing that comes in your mind while thinking about movies? Movie Posters, Right! Mostly, movie posters are responsible for catching our wavering attention. Best part of these posters that they give us a hint of the story but leave the rest to our imagination. Some of these posters from various movies are stunning and inspirational. Therefore, here we have listed 50 amazing movie posters for our designers to inspire their creativity.
The first thing we come across when reaching to a theater is the movie poster. You can find such posters anywhere in your city.
Even on social media, the posters have become a major tool to advertise a new release of a movie. So, we can say that posters are the basic and key advertising material to promote a film.
But, what is true for movies is true also for all businesses. After all, the film industry is one of the top money making industries of this world. Since the beginning, movie posters are the prime source of promotion in the film industry.
Similarly, companies are using creative posters to create awareness for their businesses, products or services. All they need to do is to stick posters on walls or anywhere else passersby for a glance by the passerby.
No doubt that posters are a powerful medium for their ability to evoke a quick response from the viewers. Good poster design can connect your company with customers.
Why Movie Posters Are Important For Any Business?
Here Are Some Of The Key Benefits of Posters For Any Business:
i. Cost-Effective Advertising
Posters are one of the most affordable forms of advertising for small businesses. You can take your brand message to masses within a small budget as compared to high costs involved in TV, print, and radio advertising.
ii. Trustworthy Visuals
People place their trust in posters. This is because these are displayed in a public space and are accessible. Our psyche is embedded with a poster as rich visuals. This is the reason for posters catching our attention.
According to a survey, in the US, 61% of people in 18 to 24 years of age group take note of the poster advertisements. Even 40% of respondents from 55 to 64 years of age said that they see poster ads.
iii. Highly Visibility
With poster ads, your brand becomes immediately visible to thousands of people. Even a passing glance at your advertisement conveys your message to your target audience. You can stick them everywhere in shopping centers, washrooms, lifts, eating areas, escalators, and most public places.
iv. Versatile Tools
Posters are vastly used as printed rectangular papers that we stick to different places for easy visibility. But, digital posters are also your excellent tools to captivate your audience on the web. You can even share images of your poster on social media for promotional purposes.
v. Create A Buzz
Posters can also help you create a buzz for your business on several platforms. For instance, you can use a poster to raise your Twitter profile. You can launch a poster campaign on social media to catch the attention of your target customers.
Considering these benefits, no surprise that more businesses are using posters than ever before. However, not all the posters are useful to catch the attention and drive customers to a business.
A primary condition for that to happen is that the poster must be a great work of design that is comparable to an artwork. The use of colors, typefaces, images, negative space, etc makes or breaks a poster design.
How To Create A Poster?
If you are a marketer or a small business owner, the best way to save money is to create posters on your own. You can do that with the help of a poster maker tool, which makes designing a lot easier even for a beginner. One of such effective tools come from Designhill, the leading creative marketplace.
With the Designhill poster maker, you can access millions of images and illustrations and unlimited theme ideas. You can quickly create a poster using this tool without having the skills of graphic designers.
After you have completed the design work, you enjoy full copyright ownership over it. You can also take the help of poster templates online to create a stunning poster.
But before you start using the poster maker software, take a good look at some of the inspirational movie posters. These are attractive works.
Here Is Our List Of Amazing Movie Posters For Your Inspiration
01. Wonder Woman
You can notice two poster designs of the same movie the Wonder Woman. The left side poster shows how to summarise the message and theme of a movie. Just one woman figure of the protagonist woman in action says it all.
Later on, after a few years, when the movie was released again, a minimalistic design was created with some elements from the original poster. The W from the original design becomes the dominant feature of the new poster.
02. Pulp Fiction
Pulp Fiction was a movie starring Uma Thruman and it was released in 1994. This poster of the movie became an icon in those times for the depiction of the actress with her smoldering gaze that stares at the viewer. besides the gaze, notice the pulp fiction novel, pistol, and cigarette, etc elements in the poster to give a hint of the story.
03. Jaws
The Jaws movie poster holds iconic status for its minimalistic design to tell the story. It is also a great example of visual marketing. The poster shows a ridiculously oversized beast white shark with sharp, uneven, and jagged teeth.
Above the shark is the image of a swimmer unaware of the lurking danger beneath the water. The poster design successfully creates horror in the minds of the moviegoers who flocked to the theater to make the movie an all-time hit.
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04. The Walk
The Walk movie tells the real story of a French tight-rope walker who walked across from the South to the North Tower of the World Trade Center when it was under construction. The original movie poster on the left has a lot of text.
But when the movie became a hit, the redesigned poster had only the movie title and a thin tag line at the bottom. Notice how just how simple verticle likes give the impression of the two skyscrapers and a man with the balancing stick and rope express the story.
05. Star Wars
Star Wars poster was inspired by the pulp artist Frank Frazetta’s style, which was known for theatrical elements. This poster by Tom Jung conveys the good vs evil theme of the movie by creating some dramatic moments and symbols.
The lightsaber’s cross motif can be seen in the poster against the Vader’s, the villain in the movie, helmet. This conveys the movie’s moral of good against evil.
06. E.T.
The movie E.T was a religious allegory, which the poster designer John Alvin depicted beautifully. The design of the hand of God and Adam was inspired by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling piece.
Later on, many other posters of the movie were made but this first one is still perhaps the best for its conveying the theme in a simple but effective way.
07. Arrival
If you care about how to create posters, then have a look at this design. Arrival is about the aliens who arrive on the Earth and give a message of humanity. They convey in smoke circles as their language of communication.
The original poster has the movie’s leading characters. But the new poster on the right gets rid of the clutter to have only one disk element from the original design and adds a circle for the smoke language.
08. Misery
The Misery poster is one of the examples of how movie posters change their designs with time. In the original design, the background is in dark blue and the red title of the movie creates the fearful environment of the movie.
But the redesigned poster uses the sledgehammer the leading character in the film uses to abuse and torture the victim. So, the designer removed everything else and kept only the hammer.
09. The Shawshank Redemption
The Shawshank Redemption is amongst the iconic films in history. The film tells the story of a man who was wrongly imprisoned for 19 years for murder. But the innocent man was digging a tunnel through his cell all those years with a rock hammer.
The minimalist poster design on the right is an inspiration for how to tell the story using the hammer element only in the negative space. Such minimalist designs look impressive irrespective of poster sizes.
10. The Breakfast Club
The Breakfast Club movie poster has just a few circles and rectangles, representing the main characters of the movie. They are in custody in a detention center. Each color of the breakfast plat stands for how the society sees each character.
You can notice that the old poster has the characters themselves while in the new poster they are represented symbolically, meaning that the people are now familiar with the film and story.
11. Borat
Borat is a cult classic movie that features the character Borat who comes to America from Kazakhstan. He makes a memorable impression on whoever he meets in the new country. In the old poster, the character is shown in person with typical features.
On the new poster, the green shape over a pink background captures the most hilarious moments of the film when the lead character, while on the beach, wears a mankini.
12. Mission Impossible
This poster is of another memorable movie Mission Impossible. Graphic designers can learn a lot from the new poster of the film. This poster depicts one of the most remarkable scenes of the espionage film with just the use of ink.
13. Interstellar
Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar is about finding a new home for humans in the universe. A team of astronauts is sent to explore the space. While the old poster works with many elements to depict a story, the new poster of the movie tells the same story in a few lines in red, black and white, and a space ship only.
14. Inception
Inception is the story of a thief who steals information from the dreams of people. The new minimalist movie poster is about the complicated human psyche, which is represented by the maze in the poster design. It surely is an inspirational poster to symbolically create a story.
15. The Fight Club
The Fight Club is the story of a white-collar worker who starts a fight club. In the original movie poster, the characters are present and the soap is shown as a symbol as the club was started with a sociopathic soap maker. In the minimalistic design, just the soap bar gives us a hint of what the story is all about.
16. Guardians Of The Galaxy
The main character in the “The Guardians of the Galaxy” is half-human who loves to carry a walkman with a tape of the 90s style. The tape has a sticker in orange shade.
The minimalist poster of the movie on the right eliminates the real images of the characters of the original poster. It now has the tape as the main element and the lead characters are in shades.
17. The Help
The Help was an Oscar-nominated movie and it was about African-American maids during the Jim Crow era. While all the leading characters are present in the original movie poster, they do not find the place in the new minimalist poster. There is only the symbolic representation of the maids in the poster since the story is already well known to the audience.
18. The Hunger
The Hunger Games movie is known for its do-or-die storyline. Its minimalist poster has just an arrowhead-shaped like the letter “A” against a gray background. The arrowhead stands for the political scenario depicted in the movie.
19. Fifty First Dates
This film tells the story of a boy who is trying hard to woo a girl whose memory goes off every night and she does not remember her boyfriend the next morning. But the boy goes on trying and finally wins over her on the fifty-first day. In the new movie poster, the couple figure is shown in black to symbolize the memory loss and the last one stands for her memory again finally.
20. Thelma And Louise
Thelma and Louise depict the story of two women who fall victim to some undesirable moments during a weekend trip. They murder many who wanted to rape one of them and drive off a cliff to plunge to their death. The car element in the new poster design stands for that defining moment of the movie.
21. 1984
The movie “1984” is about a post-apocalyptic society. In this society, Big Brother is closing watching everyone’s activity. The movie was based on the George Orwell book of the same name.
The old poster has the leading characters and the bib boss in the background. On the other side, the new poster eliminates all those elements Instead, it tells the story with a hidden camera and white background.
22. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
It is one of the movie posters using the power of symbolic expression to convey a message. The movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the story of a character who dressages up strangely with a bucket hat and aviator glasses and smokes a cigarette with a small cigarette holder.
You can notice only the hat, glasses, and the cigarette with the holder in the new poster of the movie to convey the story. No need for any additional element.
23. Dumb And Dumber
Dumb and Dumber is the comic story of two dumb men who are enjoying a lot of money they found in a suitcase in their car. They wear hats and tuxedos during a charity ball. The poster design on the right has only those hats and tuxedos to symbolically represent the characters and convey the theme.
24. Apocalypse Now
Amongst all the minimalist movie posters, the Apocalypse Now poster stands out for its unique use of design elements. The design uses one of the movie’s characters Colonel Kilgore’s statement, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” to create the poster. This famous quote of the film is represented by the bottle of scent and conveys a lot more than the quote itself.
25. Superman The Movie
The story of Superman is known to everyone and how he disguises himself in the clothing and a pair of glasses. This familiarity of characters and accessories is the basis for designing the new poster with a few elements only.
The designer used just the glasses and the name Christoper Reeves, that too in small print, at the top. People immediately recognize what the poster is all about.
26. Psycho
A mentally unhealthy man attacks the main character in the movie Psycho with a knife. This particular scene is the most defining and memorable in the movie. The design reminds viewers of that scene in the new poster but in a precise and symbolic way. There is just the name of the file and bloodstains. That is enough for viewers to recollect the story.
27. Anchorman
This also is one of the most admirable movie posters for their amazing symbolism and way to convey a story with minimal use of elements. The designer took the most important character of the film, which is about “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” and put that in the new poster. Just the mustache and hair make the leading character’s face in the new poster on the right.
28. Inglourious Basterds
The Tarantino movie “Inglourious Basterds” is about World War II and set in France, which was occupied by Nazi forces. The new poster on the right gives a hint of a notorious moment in the film when the leading character uses a non-german gesture for the number three with his hand.
29. The Shining
Compare the two movie posters of “The Shining,” and notice the stark difference. In the original design, the leading characters are shown with the gestures that define them. But in the later version of the poster, those characters are missing. Instead, there is just the movie name and the intricate pattern of the carpets. These carpets patterns are shown in the film in the hotel hallways.
30. Bottle Rocket
One of the characters wears a yellow jumpsuit. The antagonist, therefore, calls him a ‘’little banana’’. Later, the jumpsuit becomes a memorable aspect of the film. The designer used the little banana quote to create one of the best movie posters of the film Bottle Rocket.
31. Home Alone
These movie posters for Home Alone, the film about a kid who is alone at the home while two men try to rob his house. The kid than devises several traps to thwart the robbery. The paint cans were one of the traps, which is the only element in the new poster design for the movie.
32. James Bond 007
These are two of the many movie posters of ‘James Bond’ films. This one is for the film Diamonds Are Forever. In the new poster, the designer gave a twist to the 007 and turned it into an infinity sign studded with diamond. 007 is still an iconic movie poster template for bond movies.
33. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Everyone is dancing the Time Wrap is the most memorable scene of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The song for the dance is: “It’s just a step to the left. And then a step to the right. With your hands on your hips. You bring your knees in tight. But it’s the pelvic thrust. That really drives you insane.” You can see the minimalist poster of the movie on the right depicting those steps. Surely, it is one of the best movie posters.
34. Jurassic Park
The half-filled glass with water shaken by the Dinosaur’s feet thumping is the iconic scene of Jurassic Park. People are reminded of that horrifying scene again when they see the glass of water in the new poster on the right. Since the audience is already familiar with the story, just the symbolic presence of the glass is enough to convey the story.
35. The Mask
The new design of The Mask movie on the right makes borrows the elements from the original poster when the movie was released first. In the later design, the character is looking straight into the viewer’s eyes, which provides a unique viewing experience and conveys the character and the story instantly.
36. The Fifth Element
The Fifth Element is about Halloween parties and Comic-Con. It is the story of Leeloo, one of the leading characters of the film. She has influenced the entire generation with her personality. So, the new poster of the movie has just her face immortalized in a unique way.
37. Scream
The Scream poster the designer created an antique feel. The purpose of the design is to project the film as the cult classic of modern times. You can notice that the designer especially highlighted the sheer terror on the leading character Drew Barrymore’s face. That expression of fear has become a cultural icon.
38. Groundhog Day
Groundhog Day is the story of a man who experiences the same moments every day. The movie is a psychological comedy. The designer did not pick any leading characters of the movie. Instead, conveyed the story through a concept as a visualization in the poster on the right side here.
39. Hannibal
The Hannibal poster captures the crucial moment when the leading character feasts on the brain of his victim. This scene is the main concept of the poster design which is in black and white only.
40. Mad Max
The Mad Max poster redesign has the lead character Immortan Joe wearing the mask and has exaggerated orange skin. The color of the sand sticks to everybody. But this color also stands for the anger of the character.
41. A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange has the song ‘sign in the rain, which is depicted in the new poster design. The character is seen singing the song taking a position atop the street light using the ‘all-seeing eye’ analogy.
42. Inside Out
An imaginative reality is the theme of the movie “Inside Out”. It is in this reality that our feelings reside as characters inside our heads. The leading character Riley is shown as a big open eye. Inside her eye, you can notice the feelings at the table which shows what is in her head.
43. The Rocketeer
The Rocketeer poster design is elegant and direct. The designer uses the art-deco style to convey the theme and concept. There is an element of speed in the design. The red color drives the attention quickly to the poster.
44. Lord Of War
Lord of War tells the story about crimes and criminals. Its poster is one of the most admired movie posters for its work of art. The poster is designed like a Roman mosaic at first glance, but when taking a closure look, we find that it is made up of bullets. It surely is excellent graphic design work.
45. Attack Of The 50 Ft. Woman
Allison Hayes, the fictional longest women, is the leading character of the movie. She towers over the entire scenario on the highways. The poster depicts the woman picking vehicles like toys from the highway. This single image of the woman says all about the story.
46. GoodFellas
Goodfellas movie poster depicts three characters with their names. Then there is the movie name in bold letters plus a tag line. The rest of the text body is at the bottom.
47. Ad Astra
Ad Astra deals with the subject of sending a man to space to find out what happens next. The film wishes to explore the unknown. James Gray’s film takes forward the conventional soul-searching, staunch determination, and earnest helplessness ideas.
You can notice the pitch-dark black and the Sun, representing the space in the new poster of the movie. A spacecraft and an astronaut, shown as a tiny figure against the vastness of the space, also are the elements in the poster. Such minimalist design is an inspiration when you think about how to make a poster.
48. Joker
Joker is another memorable film that depicts the leading character Joaquin Phoenix as the Clown Prince of Crime. The movie is about giving a hint of the creepy menace of the simple and clean protagonist.
This is one of the memorable movie posters for its expression of a crucial moment in the film. The moment is when the character opens his arms and invites in chaos, and says goodbye to sanity.
49. In Fabric
The ‘In Fabric’ is about surreal horror. The fabric is with an eerie department store which contains a cursed dress. This dress murders all those who wear it. We can say that the movie is absurdist but it is hypnotic and unsettling.
Its poster simply has the red dress against the dark background, which stands for the mystery behind the dress. You can create such an impressive design for any poster size.
50. The Souvenir
The Souvenir is about the story of obscure identities. It is about people who love each other but keep secrets and self-worth going waste. The lead character visits her memories as a film making student and writes about her toxic relationship with an older man.
Two characters from the film are shown ignoring each other, though sitting together, and there is their reflection in the water, which is dim and distorted.
So, these are the movie posters that inspire a graphic designer to come up with unique posters. Study the use of colors, typefaces, and negative space in these posters.
All such elements have been used in a limited way to reduce the clutter. In this way, the theme of a movie becomes clear to the viewers.
To create impressive posters, as a marketer or business owner, you can either use poster maker software to design it on your own or launch a design contest at Designhill.
The contest route will let you have dozens of poster ideas from several designers. You can then pick a winning design for an event or business promotion.
Wrapping Up
Movie posters convey a story in short to the audience. Such posters also generate curiosity about the film so that people see it for the whole story. These posters are inspirational designs for their minimalist approach and perfect use of the elements of colors, typeface, images, and negative space.