If you're anything like us, you've seen a lot of movie posters, and you might have noticed
that a lot of them seem to follow the same design rules. These rules are intended to
calibrate each image to grab as many eyeballs as possible. The more eyeballs, the more viewers
interested in the movie the poster is promoting.
It's easy to parse out the reasoning behind some of these rules, while some have explanations
that are a little more esoteric. One apparent rule in particular, though, doesn't appear
to make any sense at all. It's common practice for movie posters to list the actors' names
out of order, and often completely reversed, from how the actors themselves appear on the
poster.
It's a mystery nearly as old as Hollywood itself, because this is in no way a recent
thing. It's so prevalent that we the public seem to have collectively accepted it as just
one of those weird things that probably has some explanation, even if we have no idea
what it might be. Well, we're here to shatter the mystery, because there is indeed a reason
for this odd phenomenon.
"I gotta dig a little deeper!"
First of all, the way in which a film's cast appears on the poster is not at all random.
It usually follows one of many incredibly specific templates. There are pretty much
four hard-and-fast rules, and they are as follows. The hero of the movie is centered,
and usually slightly to the right. The love interest is to the left of the hero, from
the viewer's perspective. The villain or a major morally ambiguous character will be
looming over the hero's left shoulder, while a buddy or ally will occupy roughly the same
position over the other shoulder.
There are probably about a billion different reasons a poster artist could break down to
explain why this is the way it is, but it boils down to one simple fact. It seems to
work, and if there's one thing that's helpful to know about Hollywood studio executives,
it's they love to stick with what works. Movies are expensive, and this precisely calibrated
approach to poster design is the result of truckloads of market research conducted to
maximize that investment.
"We'd love to get any reactions you have, first thoughts, there are no wrong answers."
So, we've covered character placement, but the question remains: Why are the actors'
names always out of order relative to where they are on the poster? Well, this is where
ego comes into play.
Obviously, there are several design templates for different types of movies, but regardless
of the design, one thing remains constant. The names of stars on a poster are typically
rendered either top-to-bottom or left-to-right, and are arranged in descending order of "billing."
That is, the "top billed" star, the biggest name and/or box office draw, appears first.
Some stars even have top billing worked into their contracts, and it gets weird in certain
cases where the ostensible star of the film isn't the biggest name in the cast.
Famous examples of this are everywhere, but the early superhero genre gives us two excellent
examples. On the poster for 1978's Superman, Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman, both huge
stars at the time, were billed above Christopher Reeve, who played the title character. On
the iconic, minimalist one-sheet for 1989's Batman, Jack Nicholson famously received top
billing over "star" Michael Keaton.
"Jack is dead, my friend. You can call me Joker!"
There are lots of ins and outs to this convention, but for our purposes, the simple fact is that
the order of billing rarely lines up with the order in which the cast appears on the
poster.
If you think billing order is a ridiculous thing for world-famous actors to be fighting
over, well, we're right there with you. After all, if Robert Downey, Jr.'s mug is front
and center on the poster, it's doubtful that moviegoers will get confused if his name isn't
directly beneath his picture. We recognize the guy by now.
At this point, slightly confusing name placement is such an ingrained part of poster design
that it's not likely to change anytime soon. Creative solutions to even the most contentious
billing disputes were already figured out a long time ago. Take, to name just one example,
the smash hit 1974 disaster film The Towering Inferno. To solve the problem of who would
receive top billing between Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, producers simply requested
that the poster's designers stagger the names so that McQueen's appeared furthest left on
the one-sheet, while Newman's appeared closest to the top.
Silly, right? Well, whatever it takes to make your stars happy, and keeps that dough rolling
in. We're sorry to report that out-of-order names on movie posters will, in all likelihood,
continue to drive you nuts for the foreseeable future; on the bright side, at least now you
know why.
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