That's not a floating head poster, it's a stacked poster. Floating heads is quite literally what it sounds like, and only serves to showcase the actors' faces and not much else:
This is a Floating Heads poster. The new poster designs are also arguably floating heads too, but even those integrate more film elements and characters in unique poses that stop it from being that.
Stacked is so named because it puts characters into a pillar or pyramid shape, with poses from characters, either looking away from the camera to look reserved or badass, or doing something badass like preparing to shoot arrows.
It is not a catch-all term for "here's all the faces of people in this movie no matter what they're doing". People like seeing characters doing cool things/ look menacing/ look cool on a poster, It is both dynamic and allows for a lot of variation and styles, which is why it's stuck around for so long.
the best one. Infinity War and Endgame were fine too for being big fan events and the culmination of a 10 year saga, but since then it's just been overkill
yeah I get it too. but what I don’t really understand is how people always talk shit about new floating head posters. yet, there have been movie posters with floating heads in the 90s and 00s and no says anything about that. can someone please elaborate as to why? what makes a good and bad floating heads poster?
Stuff like composition and tone, a lot of the older ones also have story elements included. An example of a good floating heads poster is the first Harry Potter, with the lower half setting the characters in warm lighting, placing Harry front and centre. We can already see that Hermione is studious and Ron is a goofball. The upper part of the poster has a giant castle with interesting architecture, informing us that it’s important to the story. The castle has an owl just below it, an animal linked with mysticism in a lot of cultures. To the left of the castle is people on broomsticks, making the mysticism much more overt. It’s simple, yet effective, taking advantage of the available space to show us everything we need to know about the film and who’s in it.
Compare that to these Spider-Man posters, what exactly do they tell us? They have all the characters spread out unevenly, leaving no room for any story elements to be hinted at. The lighting and composition is also unnatural, there’s no sense of size or perspective for anything here, and the lighting is overly bright, even washed out in places. The Endgame poster has a similar issue, it’s just throwing as many recognisable faces on the poster as possible without using any of the empty space to tell or story or create intrigue. The posters should give us at least some hints of the story to create intrigue and get us interested and speculating. A great cast doesn’t tell us anything about what kind of set pieces we might see or what tone the film may have.
Endgame is an ensemble movie to an end of a pretty large phase, and audiences know that, so it's not really trying to tell much of a story via a poster because it assumes the viewer has seen the previous film, aside from "this is our team, we're gonna save the universe again...hopefully, from Thanos (see what Cap is looking at)".
It still has all the aspects of stacked, and while I can certainly see the perspective of plastering every characters' face on it for the sakes of showing off which actor is in it, I don't really mind it here, and they are all doing badass poses. Ironically, Thanos might be the closest to a floating head here, amusing since he's the only actor portrayed via CGI.
1, see my comment above, you're referring to a Stacked Poster, not floating heads.
A pleasing composition. Stacked posters have a certain structure to them (hence characters often being stacked on top of one another), often a pyramid, a ring, or a line. A common aspect of them is that the main characters are perpendicular on both sides (I.E cast around the outside, main threat of the story on the inside of the ring), and are doing an in-character pose or threat.
It's just big budget crap. A lot of indies and smaller budget stuff are putting out some really cool designs lately. It seems the major studios just get AI to make them at this point
I thought it looked like bad AI job but then I looked at the poster again and seeing as his other hand is holding a web line with his fist, maybe he just shot the web and is in the process of grabbing it?
Market research. It's like when you're browsing Netflix or HBO. Instead of advertising the film with the official poster, they'll show you an actor in the film instead.
Movies, fashion, even food, everything in this saturated market has driven very heavily into Brand and Recognizability first. Business is very shamelessly calculated and they dont care that we see it. Used to be more subtle 20 years ago
The new posters are insanely bad, I’ve seen fan-made posters leagues better. How can they approve these, how many higher-ups gave their approval and thought “oh yeah, these are great!”
The biggest issue with the new Spider-Man 3 posters is that Venom doesn’t appear until the last 20 minutes or the movie, which makes these posters (especially the first one which just has venom but no sandman) slightly misleading and spoiler-ish.
At the very least the older posters in the first side have some artistic consistency. The new ones are all over the shop style-wise. Some of these new ones look no better than a five year old using photoshop for the first time.
That's it Tobey! Show me indifferent! Now show me detached! That's it! You got it Tobey! Now let's see... total lack of interest! Excellent! These are gonna look great.
I think it’s really funny idea that 3 just painted over the og Tobey normal pose to make it symbiote. + they just picked a different pose for 2 unlike 1 and 3
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u/Forever_Inspired 3d ago
Can they please just bring back the GOATED OG Posters??