This Week In Movie Posters, June 12th: YORGOS!

The second week of June brings us some crappy-looking sequels, Dreamworks Face, the Expend4bles, Woody Allen, and most importantly, new Yorgos.

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. All posters via IMPAwards.

This week, through the vagaries of alphabetical pasting, we begin with Bird Box Barcelona, which is a lot like what it sounds like — an NCIS: Miami-ass spinoff of 2018’s Sandra Bullock vehicle, Bird Box. It seems to ask, “what if same movie, but with people you don’t recognize and in Spain?”

I feel like we’re in that awkward middle stage of AI development, where an AI can basically write a script for a sequel to Bird Box, but we’re not quite to the point where it can put each individual subscriber’s family into the movie, which I have to believe is the end point here. Bird Box: The Robinsons! Avengers: Dave & Sheila! A glorious future awaits.

This is a Fronch poster for a very Fronch movie so subtle that at first glance you wouldn’t even realize was directed by Woody Allen. I have no idea what “coup de chance” means, but I know the face of a cuckold when I see one, and that guy back there clearly got cuckolded. A+ cuckold face, the designer was smart to stick that right in the center. Sometimes you just need one good image to give us a basic idea what the movie is about (cuckoldry).

It’s such a good cuckold face that I barely noticed that the actors seem to be having a contest for “most French-sounding name.” “Lou De Laage?” “Valérie Lamercier?” Come on. I think the winner has to be “Melvil Poupaud,” which isn’t a name so much as a collection of French sounds. It’s almost an onomatopoeia. I tried to say “Melvil Poupaud” out loud and coughed up a snail.

Every time I see footage from either of the Spider-Verse movies, it makes me angry that virtually the entire rest of the animation industry has spent the last 10 or so years trying to make that “3D” animation. Which now looks so cheap and homogenous and compared to this. Bring back 2D! Depth is for suckers!

If the goal of this poster was to make me cock my head sideways like a confused doggie, mission accomplished. I’m not sure what else the vertical format accomplishes. I will say, this is the smallest we’ve seen the Bat Plane in any of these Flash posters.

Hmm, Brian Cox as a hard-boiled ex-con? I bet he could pull it off, but I’m having a hard time imagining it. As Matt Christman once tweeted, “One of the strongest moves you can have as an actor is when you drop a Spontaneous Inexplicable British Accent on a line read. Rip Torn was the king of this.”

I feel like this is tangentially true of Brian Cox, who never entirely sounds American, but always plays these larger-than-life, force-of-nature characters who you could easily imagine spontaneously breaking into random accents now and then. It’s a great intimidation move. Nothing scares the shit out of people like someone who might be a thespian. No one is as unpredictable as an actor (look at John Wilkes Booth!).

Coolest poster so far for The Blackening, which is a sort of… black power-themed Scream? Do I have that right? I guess the disconnect here is that I don’t quite understand how you celebrate black culture while trying not to get killed by the big baddie. Horror movie characters are usually scared, which feels like sub-ideal vehicle in this case.

Fantastic poster here for Biosphere, in which everything is just a little bit off and I end up staring at it longer trying to figure it out. AND they lined up the faces with the names. God bless them.

IMDB synopsis:

In the not-too-distant future, the last two men on earth must adapt and evolve to save humanity.

Put me down as “cautiously intrigued.”

You’d never know it from the poster, but this is apparently a poster for Ghostbusters: Afterlife 2. Say what now? Well, remember Ghostbusters: Afterlife? Okay, me neither, and I even reviewed it. I described it as a Muppet Babies Ghostbusters, “something you’d probably forget the next day” and I guess I was right. The one thing I remember vividly is them using CGI to have Harold Ramis posthumously give his blessing to the entire endeavor. Seems weird, man!

Anyway, that has a sequel, and I guess it’s set somewhere cold?

It feels like we’ve been hearing about The Flash for two years straight, and everyone at Warner/DC was so busy telling us about that that they completely forgot about Blue Beetle. Or maybe it’s because I’ve never heard of Blue Beetle? Half these comic book things might as well be fake backstories someone invented for the NFT Anyway, didn’t they already do the insect arms for Iron Man at some point? This looks blue Iron Man.

Aw, Heather Graham, way to stir up fond memories in every heterosexual male approaching middle age. “Suitable Flesh” is a cool title. Sounds like something Ted Cruz says when asked to name his favorite food. Meanwhile, the tagline, “who do you think you are!” (exclamation point, not question mark, important choice there) just makes me think of that bowling guy.

Hmmm, do you think we could maybe give her a facial expression? She’s supposed to be running point, leading a crack team of commandos (or some such), and she has the facial expression of a deer absent mindedly chewing grass in a meadow.

This is the first of a batch of new character posters for They Cloned Tyrone, which is apparently a comedy on Netflix. It helps that, unlike The Blackening, the title tells a story. And so the posters feel cheeky, rather than impenetrable.

I’m pretty sure all the not-so-kind things I said about the character design for Pixar’s Elemental apply equally to Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken, which seems to have the most minimal face design you could possibly do while still achieving a recognizable Dreamworks Face. It also looks like they were trying to see how many different fonts they could squeeze into it. Which I guess makes sense; I bet there’s a lot of overlap between people who enjoy word art with many fonts and Dreamworks fans.

Here’s another poster for Blue Beetle, and would you look at all the stars in it! Why, there’s George Lopez with a crazy beard, Susan Sarandon with crazy curls, a guy with lots of tattoos, and a chubby guy who seems intrigued/horny! Plus some sort of insect man in the background! Is that the Blue Beetle’s nemesis, uh… the Dragonfly? Or… The Moth? Oh no, look out for his storytelling beam!

Damn, they did some crazy things with an ink pen here. The reverse bungee cord man? That was inspired. Who is teaching whom indeed! I smell intrigue.

Here’s another one for Extraction 2, with a slight facial expression improvement, starring Adam Bessa (?). It looks like he forgot his helmet and tried to make one out of hair.

At this point it’d probably be better if The Expendables existed only in the form of posters, which was always their strongest medium. They prove it once again here with the magnificently succinct tagline “They’ll die when they’re dead.”

Whoever came up with that one deserves a raise. If you need some help with some of the names up there, the “Fox” refers to Megan, and the “Garcia” is apparently Andy. You can’t just throw “Garcia” in there with a bunch of action movie superstars and expect me to know you mean Andy, man, I thought some ex-boxing champ was making movies now or something.

“Hi, I would like two tickets to Expend-four -bulls, please.”

(*whispering to date*) Those are the expend-four-bulls.

My God, it’s perfect. This new poster for Poor Things is almost too magnificent to gaze upon. “What if weird Photoshop but make it art?” is such a great prompt. Not that I wasn’t sold on this thing on the strength of Yorgos Lanthimos and that cast alone.

It does have a trailer now:

I kind of wish I hadn’t seen that. There’s not much upside to watching trailers for a movie you know you’re going to see.

Remember what I said about dad movies and sparks? All dad movies have gratuitous sparks now, it’s the law. Where are the sparks even coming from in this one? From the ancient ruins?

It’s all fun and games until Laura Linney shows up! I’m guessing she plays a younger version of one of the other actresses, but I confess that I’m basing this entirely on the headwear. “How do we convey the passage of time?”

“Hmm, maybe give them all little hats?”

God bless Chris Hemsworth, for at least being able to do a proper facial expression. I don’t know about that kid though. It looks like he’s blue steeling me. Quit male modeling and get in the chopper!

“What if the sparks were snowflakes?”

Probably should’ve led with this poster for They Cloned Tyrone, John Boyega sort of makes the whole conceit work by being recognizable in silhouette form.

These are great. No notes.

I’m grateful my toddler son hasn’t gotten into Paw Patrol yet. I think? Is Paw Patrol good or bad content? Is a man approaching middle age my knee-jerk opinion is that they should follow around some real dogs and make their mouths move with CG or something. Benji it up a little.