This Week In Movie Posters, December 18.

Dolph Lundgren in a Dolph Lundgren film, starring Dolph Lundgren and Kelsey Grammer.

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Welcome to the This Week In Movie Posters, the feature in which we go through all the week’s new movie posters and read way too much into them. Blessed are the paid subscribers, as without them, none of this would be possible. All posters via IMPA.

Alphabetical order be damned, we’re leading this week with this poster for Wanted Man, for obvious reasons. It seems to star the truly inspired combination of Dolph Lundgren and Kelsey Grammer. You know how in That Thing You Do the manager played by Tom Hanks decided that one of the band members should wear sunglasses all the time and that would be his trademark? The guy who designed this poster was like “okay but what if every character sunglasses?” Brilliant.

Anyway, just to recap, it appears to be an action movie starring Dolph Lundren, a guy almost as famous for being a Fulbright Scholar in chemical engineering and playing Ivan Drago, alongside Kelsey Grammer, the tossed-salads-and-scrambled-eggs singing TV shrink-turned semi-secret MAGA guy.

And guess what? That’s not even the best part:

That’s right, Wanted Man is directed and co-written by Dolph Lundgren. I can’t believe they didn’t lead with that! Shout out to Expat_Matt on twitter, “I hope we get a whole scene of him chemical engineering.”

One of the beakers just says “Frasier.”

This poster got memed to death last week, and for good reason. The facial expression alone is a masterpiece of pure blandness. It reminds me of that viral roast where the guy tells the girl she “has no details in your face. Like you look like you’re easy to draw.” (No idea where the original of this lives, probably no one involved really deserves the clicks anyway).

That’s nothing against Dakota Johnson (who, like Jamie Dornan, has actually proved herself a pretty good actress as soon as Fifty Shades ended) it’s more like they just went out of their way to get a facial expression that betrays absolutely nothing. And yet not in an intriguing poker face kind of way, just blandly neutral, like the ChatGPT Mona Lisa. I’ve had Bell’s Palsy since last week and if you just mirrored the non-working half of my face in Photoshop and stitched them together the expression would probably look something like this.

And then there’s the fact that the movie is called “Madame Web” and the tagline is “her web connects them all.”

Couldn’t think of another word in there besides “web,” huh? And then they brought in a designer and he was just like “Hmm, what about a web motif?” And everyone just sort of high fived and took a lunch.

Honestly I find laziness at this level kind of inspiring. We should all be allowed to mail it in this hard just once. (Once a week?)

Golly, how zany!

I’m glad they gave Henry Cavill the flat top and not John Cena. There are only a handful of haircuts John Cena can have that don’t make his giant square head an insurmountable distraction for me. Anyway, I feel like I should have more to say about this one, but all I’ve really got is that I feel like they could’ve done better than “the bigger the spy the bigger the lie.”

I mean sure, it rhymes. But that’s about it.

And here we have our second consecutive “character holding a gun for some reason”-style poster. It doesn’t give us much of a clue what it’s about, and the “American ____” title convention never helps in that regard. This time even less than usual. Star, like a movie star? Or like a star in the sky? Which meaning of “star” goes with “guy in suit holding gun?” (He looks sad about it too, like he initially wished for something else but all he got was this stupid gun).

Even still, it’s Ian McShane with a gun! I can’t help but be slightly intrigued. It almost feels like cheating for a movie star to have a name like “Ian McShane.” It’s like they figured out how to give a guy two first names without making it weird. Lance McJake. Quinn McSteve. Johnny McPete. It plays.

Every time a director wants to make a character look like a writer, they give him the sweater-over-collared shirt combo. What’s going on with that? Too many layers for this dude. Too much fixing your hair and collar every time you get hot and have to pull the sweater off. You guys know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, the movie’s called “Miller’s Girl” and the tagline is “write what you want.”

Based on the poster, I’m torn between inappropriate mentorship story, or this writer named Miller manifested a love interest Weird Science-style (which I believe is sort of the plot of Argylle, from a few posters ago). Any last guesses before I go to IMDB? Okay let’s do it:

A creative writing assignment yields complex results between a teacher and his talented student.

Hmm, unclear. Playing it coy, I guess. I still assume there’s going to be sex involved. You don’t cast a glistening hunk of raw animal magnetism like Martin Freeman without there being a sexual angle.

I’m still scratching my head over this concept. It’s not a sequel to Mean Girls, it’s more like a remake (the characters are still named Regina George and Cady Heron, for instance), only it’s from the same writer (Tina Fey), but it’s a musical now? I dunno, man. The trailer looks better than you’d imagine, but the concept seems like someone thought “hey, this was a great movie, but we didn’t make enough money from stupider people. Could you do it again, only louder?”

They did basically the same thing with Magic Mike 2. Oh well, at least they brought back Tim Meadows. “Redo a classic comedy only campier and with songs” doesn’t seem like the winningest strategy, but I guess if that’s what it takes to get more Tim Meadows comedies…

What’s the last great cave man movie? Has there ever been one? Encino Man doesn’t count.

“The dawn of man. The birth of fear,” is pretty solid though.

Something about big ass Futura font makes me think either “sci-fi romance” or “faith-based film,” which I guess are kind of similar things when you think about it.

I don’t know why they show up out of order, but this is one of a big new batch of character posters for The Book of Clarence, which I gather is a Black-themed Bible comedy. Can Blackness be a theme? Doesn’t feel quite right to say that, but still seems preferable to “urban-themed.” Anyway, I don’t know much about Michael Ward, but they did a great job making him look untrustworthy. Is it the manicured mustache and brows? He’s too smooth! He must be slippery.

I guess when you have a title like “The American Society of Magical Negroes” you don’t have to do much work to make it provocative. Did they card have to be “magic” too?? Eh, it works.

Here’s another one for The Book of Clarence. David Oyelowo is John the Baptist. He was always dunking little kids under water, seems like kind of a perv if we’re being honest about it. You live in the desert, man! There can’t just be tons of extra water around for dunking kids in.

“Home is where you belong.” The movie is called Housekeeping for Beginners, but the poster doesn’t make it look like there are many chores going on. Hugging’s over, guys, back to work! Time to lean, time to clean.

Aw, man, I thought we were done with the one-word titles. Come on, man, you’re not Jordan Peele. You’re making… a puppet movie? Really working that curiosity gap for this one, aren’t they? Fine, fine, I’ll be your huckleberry.

Ohhh, the “IF” stands for “Imaginary Friend.” How clever! …Or is it? It’s concise, anyway.

“From the imagination of John Krasinski” is a sentence I never expected to see in a trailer. I still think most people know him as the smirking guy? Or maybe as Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan? Anyway, would that we all could experience such professional growth.

I swear half of acting is just having an interesting face. Something about Lakeith Stanfield just makes me think “Yeah, I’ll see that.”

(Something aside from having done a lot of great acting in the past, even).

Here’s a puppy licking a clown, aka an average French movie.

Even acknowledging that Kung Fu Panda 4 is naturally going to suffer from the diminishing returns problem, this poster still kind of looks like shit, right? Just crap all over the place in ugly colors. I’m guessing it’s about the multiverse or something, though I refuse to look it up.

I started FilmDrunk in 2007, and it feels like news about a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie has been bandied around for nearly that long. Only Top Gun 2 and a Ghostbusters sequel rival it, and we’ve already gotten both of those. But finally, here it is! Beverly Hills Cop 4! …Only on Netflix. I know that last part shouldn’t make the news anti-climactic, but boy, it really does.

Oh hey look, it’s Millie Bobby Brown starring in… a dragon movie? I’m pretty sure that’s a dragon. Kids love dragons. I only saw the first season of Stranger Things, so if you told me Millie Bobby Brown was a 47-year-old mommy vlogger now I’d probably believe you. Time works differently in showbiz. Anyway, it looks like the concept for this poster was “imagine dragons.”