There’ve been a fair few sub-par posters this year, but none quite as flabbergasting as the one revealed for Oscar front-runner “The King’s Speech” last week. Apparently designed by a first-time Photoshop user during Bring Your Child To Work Day at the marketing wing of the Weinstein Company, it made the poster for “The Switch” look like it was designed by Saul Bass.
The film’s director, Tom Hooper, who’s moving his way onto the A-list with the success of the film, is, fortunately, not blind, and recently revealed to Movieline that he’s no fan of the artwork. When their reporter brought it up with the helmer, he told them “let’s just say that the poster will be replaced very quickly with a very good poster.”
When they pressed him on it, he went on to say “I hate it. I hate it. And it is not going to ever be on any cinema walls. It will be replaced. It’s a train smash. It’s a train smash.” He’s not entirely wrong and it’s good to see the helmer kick up a fuss — while we’re not sure that the poster would have harmed the film’s awards chances exactly, it certainly cheapened a mostly decent piece of work.
We imagine the house-elves at TWC are slaving away to create something a little more palatable at the moment, with the film set to begin a limited rollout on November 26th. But if they’re really stuck for ideas, we’d like to submit our design below, which the Weinsteins are welcome to use without charge. You’ve got to admit, it’s an improvement.
You can call me easy to please but I don\’t think the poster looks that bad. I certainly would not describe it as a train smash. A good movie poster, I think, should pose a question: who, where, what, when or how. The facial expressions of these characters in the poster intrigued me and actually make me wonder what they may be thinking. The poster has a narrative of it\’s own; obviously something is afoot just by looking at the actors faces. There\’s a spark of impishness and resolve in the actors expressions. A film like this is going to gain legs by word of mouth anyhow and I don\’t think the poster is squandering any opportunities. It\’s three actors more or less beckoning to me to look into their world. While it\’s not all that ambitious, I think the poster designers could have done far worse with a movie in which the main conflict is a speech impediment.
Won\’t people be confused and think this is sequel to Zach and Miri Make a Porno?