This Week In Movie Posters, June 5th!

We've got de-aging technology, plucky chins, some doomed horny teens, and a movie that's called "Bottoms."

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 is the first of this week’s character posters for The Blackening. At first glance, I didn’t understand that this tagline up top was supposed to be a quiz question — Name 8 Madea movies.

It’s only clear when you see it in context with the other ones (more on those in a second). I wasn’t sure how it related to the movie either. Fine, I give up, I’m using my phone-a-friend on IMDB:

Seven black friends who go away for the weekend only to find themselves trapped in a cabin with a killer who has a vendetta. Will their street smarts and knowledge of horror movies help them stay alive? Probably not.

Ahhh, now it makes sense. I mean, sort of. Are Madea movies considered horror now? Anyway, I’m getting Scream meets the “I Know Black People” trivia game from Chappelle Show. Which is definitely two things, though I’m not entirely sure how they add up to a movie.

I defy you not to read this poster in Melissa Etheridge’s voice (in other news, a timer just told me it’s time to take my back medicine).

Anyway, AI, make me a YA weepie!

My only question here is which one of them has a terminal disease. Aw, remember this genre? I know it probably makes me a bad person, but I laugh every time I think about Shailene Woodley wearing an oxygen mask in The Fault In Our Stars.

Sorry, that’s good stuff. In my defense, I’m 90% sure Ben also enjoyed this, right up until the end.

Here’s another one for the same movie, and… wait, perhaps I’ve miscalculated! It seems it’s not a YA terminal disease movie at all, but rather some kind of YA ripoff of Cloud Atlas. About soul mates whose love transcends eras or some crap. Here they are as… hmm, late sixties himbos? Sure, let’s go with that. This man looks like he’s from an era that was more accepting of domestic violence.

Wait, foiled again! It was at this point I realized that the previous two posters maybe don’t feature the same couple. Did anyone else make this mistake? It looked like the same people in different costumes! Sorry, I have to go to IMDB again:

Follows Raquel and Ares as they face challenges in the next chapter of their relationship and their individual lives.

Well that sure isn’t much help. It’s also apparently in Spanish. I guess it’s some kind of relationship drama kind of thing? It sort of just looks like young people wearing clothes to me . Makes me feel like Royal Tenenbaum trying to figure it out. “What characters? It’s just a bunch of little kids dressed up in costumes.”

Hold up, there’s a Jackie Chan/John Cena movie coming out and no one bothered to tell me? I can’t tell from the poster whether it’s a drama or a comedy, only that it promises… lots of sparks. We love sparks, don’t we, fellow dads?

Maybe this is crazy to say, but something about John Cena’s hair in the poster makes this look really low-budget. A movie that cost more to make would’ve given him more realistic-looking hair.

I just looked it up, and it seems unrealistic looking hair is a thing with this director. Check out his last film, a snowboard movie starring Josh Hartnett (one of my new favorite series of words):

Come on, that hair just screams “straight to video.”

Is that the boogeyman back there? Look out, lady, it’s the boogeyman. No time for cigarettes now.

Uh oh, now she’s going to hockey it to death. Better deke him a few times, boogeymen always fall for that. (“Deke” seems like a word with a very limited use case, so I always make sure to capitalize when I find one).

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, known for her cynical sex-comedy masterpiece, Fleabag, seems like an odd choice for a mostly sexless, old-timey 40s comic book-style franchise like Indiana Jones. What this poster presupposes is, “yeah, but doesn’t she kinda look like Karen Allen?”

Touché, I guess, they do both have very plucky-looking chins. Hey, did you know George Lucas originally wanted Marion Ravenwood to have “had an affair” (his words, not what I would call that) with Indy when she was 12? I’m pretty happy I didn’t live through the 70s sometimes.

If Phoebe Waller-Bridge has a plucky looking chin, this is more like… a wry, curmudgeonly chin. Like you know the voice that comes out of there is going to sound like 10 pounds of wet gravel but once you scrub away the sarcasm it’s probably going to be very wise.

Another great chin, but this one is somewhat overshadowed by the all-around great face surrounding it. What a face on this guy. Mads Mikkelsen so perfectly fit to be an Indiana Jones villain I can’t believe he hasn’t played one yet.

Apparently this is Shaunette Renée Wilson, and hey, did anyone else just get time period whiplash? Everyone else is in fedoras and all of a sudden we’re in Austin Powers now. You can’t just Trojan Horse the 60s on my like that, I need time to prepare.

Hot off the presses, it’s this new poster for Bottoms, yet another one to shout out Cocaine Bear above the title. You’d think Cocaine Bear was a generation-defining comedy and not a poster that went on too long. Anyway, the title makes me think this is about gay sex (for once I don’t think it’s my imagination) but the tagline (which feels like a perfect parody of virtually every Joss Whedon project) doesn’t seem to relate to that?

Luckily, they sent me the official synopsis along with the poster so I can just go directly to my email for this one:

BOTTOMS, a refreshingly unique raunchy comedy, focuses on two girls, PJ and Josie, who start a fight club as a way to lose their virginities to cheerleaders. Their bizarre plan works. The fight club gains traction and soon the most popular girls in school are beating each other up in the name of self-defense. But PJ and Josie find themselves in over their heads and in need of a way out before their plan is exposed.

That sounds bizarre and and kind of amazing, but now I’m even more confused as to why it’s called “Bottoms.” To say nothing of the fact that Marshawn Lynch was in it. For a second I thought he’d come a long way since “Beast Mode don’t take pictures with mens.”

Vince Mancini “Sleeptrain”

Vince Mancini “Sleeptrain” on Instagram: “God damn marshawn rules. He’s about a foot out of frame, by the way.”

May 12, 2023

(I took that picture myself. Not every day you get to say that).

Okay, they just released the trailer (Substack and Twitter are still fighting so I can’t embed it). It actually looks… kind of good?

This movie must be a real party. I know because they’re using that “it’s a real party” font.

I feel like Lionsgate specifically specializes in this kind of marketing campaign. “Meet the whole gang! They’re INSUFFERABLE!”

I don’t think I’m crazy for thinking this new Pixar movie looks like garbage, am I? It looks like North Korean knockoff animation. The bad guy is going to be a smoke monster who eats coal and the cool fire teen is a metaphor for juche.

Is that… cocaine? Can they… can they do that? Or maybe it’s supposed to be perfume or make up powder or something? It’s not crazy that my first thought was cocaine, is it? If you put a powder or a spray in a poster you have to tell me what it is, that’s the law.

Wow, I can’t believe they made a War Horse sequel without Spielberg. I hope it’s about this guy’s one-man mission to kill the War Horse. “To kill a horse… it takes a cowboy.”

I was kind of joking about the Flash posters this week, but now I’m serious: the Bat Plane has been the focal point of every single poster and always bigger than any of the characters. At this rate there better be 30-plus minutes of gratuitous bat plane footage.

I like the old school-ness of this new Dial of Destiny poster (don’t ask me why these posters paste not in alpabetical order, quirk of Substack, I guess) but I already don’t trust the de-aging tech they’re using for Harrison Ford. It doesn’t bode well when you can’t make it look real in a still frame.

I only know this because I have a basketball-obsessed stepson, but there’s an inspirational Giannis biopic on Disney+. So naturally we’re getting a Lebron James version on Peacock. I don’t really have any thoughts on that other than that shorts used to be really big. Even when shorts were still really big, I remember thinking “shorts have been really big for a long time now.”

The huge shorts trend lasted a good 20 years. By comparison, the “men’s dress shoes with wide square toes” lasted like eight months. I hope the regular-sized shorts trend lasts as long as the huge shorts trend. These gams need to BREATHE, BABY.

The air guy (I’m assuming the cloud is meant to represent the air element) looks a little better than fire and water, but not much.

12! Ha, do I get a prize now? Also how is this a movie?

Jim Carrey and… dammit, what’s the curly-haired lady’s name? Fine, you stumped me. (It’s Kelly Coffield Park, but knowing that doesn’t make me more interested in this movie).

YORGOS. I have no idea how the clown makeup fits into the plot or what this movie is about at all, but you had me at “Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone.” Get the The Favourite band back together and you can have my money. Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, and Jerrod Carmichael is also a collection of names I never imagined I’d see together but I’m not mad about it.

I’m usually anti-pointlessly diagonal horizon line (side note: I wonder what David Lynch-as-John-Ford-in-The-Fablemans would’ve said about those) but this is a rare case in which it works. Also, “the only American to win the Tour De France” is a beautifully subtle middle finger of a tagline. A+.

This new poster for Oppenheimer continues the hottest trend in dad movie posters: sparks! Lots and lots of sparks! Is that meant to appeal to dads because we love lighting the grill? Fair point, I suppose.

I don’t think they should be allowed to have all those sparks around the nuclear weapons, it seems dangerous. (Very cool poster).

Is it just me or is the hat too big now? I feel like the hat gets bigger with each subsequent poster and it makes it look like he’s shrinking. He looks like an Indiana Jones Pez dispenser. The next movie is just going to be about a fedora with two little legs.

Dammit. This actor’s name is right on the tip of my tongue, and they didn’t put it on the poster. He was in… that one movie! With… with the thing? Remember, the guy? Ugh, this is making me feel like my mom, this should be illegal.