Above: first US teaser poster for Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, US/UK/Ireland, 2023). Design by Vasilis Marmatakis.
I don’t know whether it’s because of the power of Yorgos Lanthimos, or the popularity of Emma Stone, or the sheer genius of designer Vasilis Marmatakis, or a combination of all of them, but three out of the four most liked posters on my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram over the past six months have all been posters for Lanthimos’s latest, Poor Things (two teasers and an official release poster, to be precise). The teaser above is now the most liked poster ever on my feed.
Breaking up the Poor Things monopoly at number two is Polish designer Maks Bereski’s fan-art design for Ridley Scott’s yet-to-be-released Napoleon, which also went through the roof with over 4,000 likes when I posted it in June in conjunction with my article on Bereski and his favorite movie posters.
Instagram likes are a fickle thing but it’s always informative to see what generates the most of them. Not only are there three posters for Poor Things in this half-year’s Top 20, but there are two for Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and two, sort of, for Midnight Cowboy (1969). One of those is actually my own design for Nancy Buirski’s documentary Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy (2022), which I posted last month when Buirski died unexpectedly just months after her film was released by Zeitgeist Films and Kino Lorber, where I work as the design director.
In memoriam posts are sadly often a feature of these roundups, and the fifth most popular poster of the half-year was Akiko Stehrenberger’s beautiful unused design for the Sinéad O’Connor documentary Nothing Compares (2022). There is also the Polish poster for Sorcerer (1977), directed by William Friedkin, who died at the age of 87 in August, and two Mondo posters for The Road (2009), posted in honor of author Cormac McCarthy, who died in June.
On a happier note, it was a nice coincidence that Laurent Durieux’s gorgeous poster for the re-release of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963) ended up next to the new poster for the upcoming documentary Godard Cinema (2022).
So here, in gently descending order, are the Top 20 most-liked posters of the past six months of Movie Poster of the Day. Please like and subscribe, as they say.
Above: 2022 fan-art poster by Plakiat, a.k.a. Maks Bereski, for Napoleon (Ridley Scott, US, 2023).
Above: official US one sheet for Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, US/UK/Ireland, 2023). Design by Vasilis Marmatakis in collaboration with Empire Design with title lettering by Vladimir Radibratovic and digital retouching by Eirini Alexi.
Above: second US teaser poster for Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, US/UK/Ireland, 2023). Design by Vasilis Marmatakis.
Above: unused poster design by Akiko Stehrenberger for Nothing Compares (Kathryn Ferguson, UK/Ireland, 2022).
Above: French re-release grande for Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1975). Design by Juliette Gou.
Above: French 60th anniversary re-release poster by Laurent Durieux for Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1963).
Above: US one sheet for Godard Cinema (Cyril Leuthy, France, 2022). Designer unknown.
Above: 1968 Czech poster by Hermína Melicharová for Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, Japan, 1964).
Above: Japanese chirashi for A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1991). Designer unknown.
Above: fan-art poster by Neven Udovicic for La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1961).
Above: 1969 Polish poster by Waldemar Swierzy for Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, US, 1969).
Above: 2012 Mondo poster by Jay Shaw for Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, US, 1957).
Above: French re-release grande for A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1991). Design by Dark Star.
Above: US one sheet for Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy (Nancy Buirski, USA, 2022). Design by Adrian Curry.
Above: 1979 Polish poster by Andrzej Pagowski for Sorcerer (William Friedkin, USA, 1977).
Above: 2016 Mondo posters by Randy Ortiz for The Road (John Hillcoat, US, 2009).
Above: French poster for About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 2023). Designer unknown.
Above: 2022 Swedish re-release poster for La Jetée (Chris Marker, France, 1962). Art by Knut Larsson, design by Jens Andersson.
Above: US one sheet by Maria Jesus Contreras for The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future (Francisca Alegría, Chile, 2022).
You can see more of these biannual roundups here and you can follow Movie Poster of the Day on Instagram for that daily dose of cinephilic graphic pleasure.