Four brand new Where the Wild Things Are character posters.  There’s not a whole lot to the design, but as far as character posters go, they’re pretty great.  Why all the sad eyes?  You should be excited the wild rumpus is about to start! [via]

I feel like Bruckheimer and director Mike Newell might have another Pirates of the Carribean-type hit with this one.  An epically, fun summer romp.  Escapist cinema as it’s best and worst. 

Gyllenhaal looks the part of the video game character.  But, there’s a wide disconnect between the movie taking place 1,000 years ago in Persia (Iran) and the modern typeface used to promote it.  The collision of cultures.

The typeface from the game looks much better.

And as cool as the poster makes Gyllenhaal out to be, it still feels like a minor design retread from the Sin City, Spirit days. 

There’s also something else about it, that I can’t put my finger on.  Oh, it’s somewhere buried deep in the recesses of my brain, but it doesn’t want to come out.  If feels like this is a complete rip-off of something else – the modern font, the washed out colors except for the bright red. 

300 perhaps?

Film School Rejects premiered this poster and it, along with everything else from the movie, is pretty great.  The composition, the destroyed modern warfare ruble, the sentient ragdoll wondering whether or not he should continue on.

You can now get updates from the fictional scientist who made the rag dolls in the film by befriending him on facebook.  So there’s that.

For all the Twi-hards that read this little corner of the universe.  I know there are like five of you, so here you go. 

First official one-sheet for New Moon.  It’s probably not as exciting as say, Edward and Jacob without their shirts on or anything, but I guess if you’re going that route, then Bella has to go topless too. 

And then, we’d all feel icky since the three of them combined are probably still under the age of 30. 

[via AICN.]

Also? A look at some of the better Twihard-made posters.

The site is described as “an ongoing experiment to abstract and/or reduce film posters.” It challenges people to name movies based on simple and artfully constructed versions of already existing movie posters.

In many ways, the experiment is reductive art reminds me of what Google did with their Chrome commercial a few days ago (something the site acknowledges here).  It’s boiling something down to their colorful, blocky essence. 

New posters are added every day and some are even available for purchase.  The poster to the left is for Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, obviously.  Or maybe not if you’ve never seen the movie or the poster. 

Furthermore, I wish some studios were brave enough to create movie posters in this style.  [h/t Whitney]

This is a brilliant poster for Spike Jonze’s much-anticipated Where the Wild Things Are. It was dug up by The Spike Jonze Fan Blog by mining the pages of Nick Magazine.

I’m not entirely surprised they’ve decided to hide the face of the monsters in this teaser poster, but if CHUD is correct, then we’ll have a trailer for this movie attached to Monsters vs. Aliens. With all the problems this is having, it’ll remain to be seen what sort of market this movie has.

The CHUD tipster described the movie as thus:

Try as I might, I can’t verbalize how I felt about the trailer beyond the most grandiose superlatives: ‘beautiful’ and ‘gorgeous’ and ‘breathtaking’, making me sound like Pete Hammond. The environments in particular (there’s a sequence of cutting between 4 shots of Max running through different environments that is absolutely magical) are a work of incredible vision, especially in light of the production methods Spike opted for. It does feel like a ‘kids movie’ (not pejorative): the trailer repeatedly made me about eight years old, over and over again. Unless I’m an idiot, and you’ll see yourself in a week or two, the finalized monsters are some kind of incredible technical achievement.

The trailer will be scored entirely to The Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up.” Which is kinda  a perfect, arty tune and tonally/thematically spot on for Maurice Sendak’s seminal book.

Usually reshoots mean bad things for movies, but if they can get this movie pitch perfect in tone.  .  .

[via Geeks of Doom]

Three teaser posters for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds have been released. You can see them all at Empire Online.

The film’s release date is currently set for August 21, 2009.

Movie posters don’t make themselves and the best ones are created by artists, not thought up in some horrible marketing room. At the height of the art form, the posters work on two levels: they make you intrigued for the movie and they capture the tone and feeling of the movie as well.

It’s not easy to do and more often than not you get a lame photoshopped movie poster than does neither of those two objectives. Thankfully, there is Drew Struzan.

Struzan has created posters for such movies as Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Hellboy, Harry Potter, Rambo, The Goonies, E.T., The Shawshank Redemption and Blade Runner.

His name, in certain circles, is spoken with reverence for his body of work, but until now there hasn’t been much written about him. Just listen to what two directors had to say about his artwork.

Guillermo del Toro is among the filmmakers who rave about Struzan’s ability to expand the world of a movie through his pictures — images that, while printed, hardly seem static. “What Drew does isn’t really distilling the elements of a movie,” says Del Toro, who has enlisted Struzan to do posters for “Hellboy” and its upcoming sequel, as well as a limited-edition piece for “Pan’s Labyrinth.” “It’s almost alchemy. He takes images and makes them quintessentially cinematic. His style has been copied so many times in a bad way, people don’t realize until they revisit his posters just how powerful the pure Struzan style is, how purely filmic it is.”

Frank Darabont is such a fan, he not only has tapped Struzan for pieces for “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” he has also made him a basis for Thomas Jane’s lead character in last year’s “The Mist.” (Several of Struzan’s originals were featured on-screen as set dressing.) “Most of what passes for movie poster art these days are just Photoshopped pictures of actors striking saucy poses and staring at us like a troop of lobotomy victims,” Darabont says. “Drew’s work speaks to me on a much deeper level. The images he renders become part of that film’s iconography and history, just as important in some respects as the film itself, and sometimes better.

“He crafts a piece of art that honors your film instead of just merely trying to sell it,” he adds. “Seriously, for a filmmaker who really appreciates what poster art means, Drew doing your poster is like getting an award.”

Having del Toro, a master of visuals himself, and Frank Darabont, who, no matter what happens for the rest of his life made one of the greatest movies with The Shawshank Redemption, speak that highly of Struzan is a testament to his work.

Strangely, the article focuses only on the artists professional life and we glean little in the way of how Struzan evolved or lives his life. Despite being the one artist all movie directors want, he isn’t in high demand because the majority of movie posters are created with Photoshop and computers.

Though movie work is not as forthcoming, Struzan was commissioned by the USPS to do a series of stamps and he’s recently gone back to his roots designing album artwork for musicians. Oddly, for the man who has drawn actor Harrison Ford more than anyone else, he’s never really met him.

Struzan admits, it’s the great irony of his career that he’s never actually met Harrison Ford. “I’ve drawn Harrison more than any other person on the face of the Earth, but I’ve never been a part of Hollywood,” he says, sounding characteristically Zen about his tangential industry involvement. With a laugh, he notes that he’s inching closer, though. Thanks to his Oscar poster assignment, he got to go to this year’s ceremony, where Ford was a presenter. “So I finally saw him in person — from the fourth balcony, about 200 yards away.”

At heart, he seems to be a fan of the movies just like everyone else. And maybe that’s what makes his work so much better than anything else out there.