Saturday 27 April 2013

A Question of Art

It's been quite a while since I've felt the need to complain about anything on here. In fact I think the only other instance was my post about the lack of Triple-Play feature on Blu-Rays, so I'm going to ask that you to indulge me another rant.

Something has been irritating me quite a bit recently, something that can be best illustrated through a little comparison:

On the left is the poster for The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a poster that I fell a little bit in love with during the films marketing campaign. On the right it the cover art for the Blu-Ray release of the film.
Seriously, what the hell is that?

I finally caved in and bought the film. Mainly because I really wanted to own it but also because I finally gave up on my hopes that maybe the distributors would realise their mistake and recall all copies to change the artwork.

Unfortunately the, for want of a better term, f*cking up of DVD and Blu-Ray release artwork isn't limited to just Perks. This has been a problem that I've been noticing time and time again.

I've spent a good deal of my academic career studying art and would like to think I know a little something about what looks good and what doesn't. While I'm aware that this is all a matter of taste, it genuinely drives me mad when a perfectly good poster fails to make it beyond the cinema wall or IMDb page. I've built up quite an extensive film collection over the years, and am not ashamed to admit that I've bought quite a few of my DVDs based on the cover art, and so the consistent release of ugly cover art makes buying the film quite off-putting. I know the poster doesn't effect the actual film in any way but it does effect the look of my collection.

To prove illustrate my frustration further, here are six more examples, all from films that have either been released recently or are due for release soon.


Again the left is the cinematic release poster and the right is the home release. I initially tried to justify all of this as a way of maybe toning down gaudy posters which would explain Perks and Seven Psychopaths getting massacred. However the people behind the release of Savages and Silver Linings Playbook seemed to think the opposite, taking two of my favourite posters and uglying them up with the addition of colour. Pitch Perfect got overhauled for absolutely no apparent reason and whoever designed the art for Zero Dark Thirty clearly couldn't decide what the films selling point was, they should have just stuck with Chastain.

I realise this rant will probably not achieve anything, and outside of using a shedload of time and money to print and re-cover my films I'm not likely to ever get these posters in DVD form. However I would like to know if this bothers anyone else? Are there any DVD posters you know of that do an even worse job than these?

Please, let me know.

4 comments :

  1. I agree with you. Sometimes the artwork they choose for the Blu-ray covers just baffles me. Although there are times that it actually improves and we get a SWEET Blu-ray cover.

    I'd say out of the ones you listed above, Savages is the biggest downgrade. I think the original poster for that movie is one of the best movie posters in the last couple of years and the one on the Blu-Ray case is a travesty. Breaks my heart :-(

    Funny post!

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    1. Thankyou! I'm glad somebody agrees :)

      Savages is definitely a the worst, I adore the actual poster and really don't understand why it was changed. I hope this kind of thing eases off soon because it's so frustrating to find a poster you love has been swapped for a crappy photoshop job on the DV, although I won't hold my breath.

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  2. I completely agree. I am not a Blu-ray collector so my purchases are just your bog-standard DVDs. I think it is such a shame when a captivating poster is seen as unusable after a film's box office release. I try to justify it thinking..."They sell more copies if they put the number of nominations and wins on the box" but sometimes it's just stupid. It's as if they think the public are fools and will only buy a film if it's really obvious who is in it and what it's called. I can't think of any good examples off the top of my head but let me have a rummage through my film collection and see what I come up with...One good example I have is 'The Colour Purple'. My DVD cover is the same as the original movie poster and it always draws attention to itself when people are looking through my films because of its endearing cover.

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    1. The Colour Purple is a great example! I love that poster so much.
      It really is such a shame that some of the higher-ups in the industry seem to think that we need everything made extremely clear to us in a bold font, otherwise we won't buy the DVD. There are some brilliant posters out there that are rarely seen, many of which have drawn me to their respective films, so it becomes extremely irritating to see those posters tossed aside in favour of a close-up of the lead actors face.

      I'll be interested to see what examples you can find. I was tempted to look through my collection as well but thought it would be better to show off the huge amount of recent ones which have led me to writing this post.

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