This Week In Movie Posters, June 19th

Tom Cruise is cinema's foremost dangler.

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.

We begin this week with the new French poster for Barbie, which has the names correctly lined up with the faces and everything! (Frequent readers of This Week In Movie Posters will know how rare this is and how much it pleases me).

The pose is also, apparently, a Barbra Streisand reference:

https://twitter.com/callasspoem/status/1669688467654078469

(I guess you have to click it, because Substack and Twitter are still fighting).

I obviously recognized this Barbra Streisand reference for what it was immediately because I’m such a big Streisand guy. Me and the boys all had Barbra Streisand posters hanging in our dorm rooms back in college.

Here’s another one, and again with the faces and the names lined up. I’ll be honest, when all these Mattel and Hasbro movie deals were first being announced 13 or 14 years ago I thought they were the stupidest ideas ever. Remember when Taylor Lautner was set to star in Stretch Armstrong? The stories all reported it as if the movie studios were paying the toy companies for the rights to their toys, which always seemed backwards to me. Why would you pay a company for the right to advertise their product? Companies usually pay the ad agency.

I don’t really know what my point is in this long digression, but I truly never imagined that a Barbie movie would have Marbot Robbie and Ryan Gosling in it, and be directed by Greta Gerwig, who has made some of my favorite movies of the past few years (I will choke out anyone who badmouths Ladybird or Little Women). I don’t know that it’s good that all these artists are spending their productive years making a Barbie movie, but it looks like they’re at least having fun with it. Commerce!

This is a gorgeous new poster for Kokomo City, which is the first I’m hearing of Kokomo City. The neon, the smoke plume, the font, and the blinds casting shadows on the wall are all doing their art deco thing. Why were the shadows of venetian blinds such an art deco/film noir staple, anyway? Is it because so many of those hard-boiled detective novels were set in LA, in the bright sunlight? Discuss.

Anyway, nice combination of angles and curves, plus a succinct tagline that gets the point across. A+, quick shipping, would do business again, etc.

I don’t think I ever saw Thoroughbreds, but that had really good posters too. This one, it seems, is about weird slug aliens? It looks strange and I am intrigued.

IMDB:

When an occupying alien species' bureaucratic rule and advanced technology leaves most of Earth impoverished and unemployed, two teenagers hatch a risky plan to ensure their families' futures.

Bureaucratic aliens, you say? Count me in.

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This is the first of a bunch of new posters for Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. After both The Flash and Pixar’s Elemental bombed (relative to expectations) this weekend, Tom Cruise is once again poised to become the savior of the box office this summer, and with it the theatrical experience as a whole. I like to make my Scientology jokes (where is Shelly Miscavige??!), but I’m mostly okay with the Tom Cruise-as-movie-savior narrative. He has his issues, but sometimes an intense little guy is just what you need.

This poster seems to be relying on the ol’ curiosity gap. What is he handcuffed to? Where is he standing?? I bet it’s something dangerous and somewhere high. Come on, someone bet me.

I know Tom Cruise is a little guy, but this is ridiculous! He looks like a GI Joe in this one. Bad photoshop, one star.

This poster made me tilt my head around like a confused doggy and it kind of looks like Eddie Van Halen’s signature guitar. That being said, Randall Park? An acclaimed graphic novel? I am intrigued. I think it worked.

Hmm, this looks like one of those movies you see at a film festival that has many ruminative shots of vistas and an introspective turn from the lead actor but is a little too uneventful to wholeheartedly recommend as a movie. And then what do you say about it? You want a film like that to be able to exist but you can’t quite lie and say it changed your life either. And so it mostly just makes you feel guilty about not liking it more.

Official synopsis:

A young woman grieving for past losses receives an unexpected invitation, leading her onto a solitary road trip across the American Midwest.

Yep.

This looks like normcore Natural Born Killers. Natural Norm Killers.

Here’s another very cool poster for Rebel Moon, which seems determined to trick us into thinking it’s a Star Wars movies I hate that title font, which looks like a Boomer wanted something that “looked cool” and grabbed it off a free fonts site, but otherwise the imagery is pretty great (if very influenced by Rogue One).

I’m actually glad it’s not a Star Wars movie, because I can only dream of what kind of movie Zack Snyder would make with the general lack of creative oversight Netflix provides. Like maybe this robe babe is going to have a bikini on under there and that gun is going to transform into an even bigger gun. Color me excited, and a little scared. Wikipedia calls it “an epic space opera film.”

Look at him dangling! This is the smartest poster for Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I, because it really sells the dangling. No one can dangle like Tom Cruise. He’s cinema’s foremost dangler.

Ay, these friggin kids nowadays, whaddya do wit em, am I right? I ain’t a bettin’ man but if I was I’d bet dis broad right heah’s got a complicated relationship wit her motha.

This is like a 2d animation twist on that old John Wick 2 poster with all the guns. I guess she’s a lil dragon baby or something. She looks like a handful though! Someone here should’ve watched How To Train Your Dragon Baby.

Did I mention Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning gave us about 20 new character posters as well? I’m not going to post all of them, but here’s one of Cary Elwes. I forget who he plays in these, but it looks like he’s about to give Tom Cruise’s character a good talking to. “God dammit, Hunt! Are you out there dangling again? How many times have we been over this? I’ve got the chief on my ass every day! I’m getting sick and tired of cleaning up all your ropes and crampons!”

I don’t know if it’s a “me” thing or a John Travolta thing, but seeing John Travolta in a tough guy cowboy hat cracks me up every time. By the way, Travolta, Stephen Dorff, and Kevin Dillon all in the same movie should win some kind of award for stunt-casting.

“My next movie? It’s actually about the mob. It’s called Mob Land.”

Here’s the D-Box poster for MI:DR. I guess every format gets its own poster now. They should hire Mark Wahlberg as their spokesman. “D-Box: Feel it, feel it.”

I like to imagine that Tom Cruise keeps all his costumes and that his closet looks like a Lego man’s. Truck Driver, Pilot, Army Man, Desert Guy, Polar Explorer…

As sandstormy as it looks wherever Tom Cruise is in this, I’m glad they didn’t leave out the SPARKS. Sparks tell me that this movie is for dads. Which appeals to me as a dad.

That lady doesn’t seem to know why all those cops are out there but it looks like ol Tommy Cruise is about to mansplain it to her.

GRRR, SPARKS!

Why are they diagonal? Do people stand sideways on Venus? Does the gravity work differently there? You can tell me that’s not Taylor Lautner but I refuse to believe it.

I’m not sure facial expressiveness is the best way to sell Gal Gadot, but that’s just me. “Heart of Stone” seems like an accurate reflection of her acting range so far. “From the producers of MI:DR and the Old Guard” makes me think this is going to be an action movie about her bonking people, probably focus on that.

Is she going to claw that child? Ma’am, don’t you claw that child! This is a house, not a cob web!

Another Disney-Pixar production, another sorta boring character design. I don’t entirely know what “the universe called… the wrong number means” but it at least sounds a lot more interesting than Elemental.

If this was 2001 someone would definitely make an “Elián” parody out of this. Remember Elián Gonzalez? God I’m old.

I’m glad this is finally on streaming. I don’t entirely know the true story behind this (probably because it’s untold!) but this dude looks like he’s about to become the Elvis of 17th century violining. That swagger. That sense of purpose. The ladies can’t resist him! Some poor servant is going to have to power wash those hoop skirts.

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ALSO!

• The latest Frotcast is online. Joe Sinclitico joins us to talk about “Pablo-matic,” Hannah Gadsby’s Pablo Picasso installation, and episode 2 of The Idol.

• Episode 304 of Pod Yourself The Wire, our Pod Yourself A Gun sequel about The Wire, is now available for early download on Patreon. We hit 1100 Patrons this past week! Shoutout to all the real ones for subscribing.