This is the poster for the upcoming game – Call of Duty WWII.
This is The 2000 yard stare – a painting by Tom Lea, a war artist. I first saw this when I was maybe 9 or 10 in the Time Life book series on World War II.
There are a whole lot of images which have an extreme close-up. But, this image just popped up in my head when I saw the COD WWII art.
Troy + Beowulf = Ponnar Shankar. Shame on the one claiming to have “dee-gyned” the posters for the movie.
Exhibit A: Animated Ray Winstone + Eric Bana = Prashanth Thiagarajan. I love the text in the background abruptly disappearing when it encounters Blue “Beowulf” Prashanth.
This movie is the gift that keeps on giving.
Exhibit B
Emperor Naresuan the Great of Thailand (One of Thailand’s biggest budget films) gets the Face-Off treatment – Prashanth ends up looking weird with that hairstyle. The Horror! The Horror!
Truly Inspired. Now, to conquer my fears and watch Ponnar Shankar, the movie – dubbed in Hindi.
Call it plagiarism. Call it channelizing. Call it repurposing. Looks like a lazy bit of recycling.
The teaser for Shankar’s Ai leaves you with a “Where have I seen this before?” feeling.
I can evn go to the extent of ignoring the Rohit Shetty Physics , the weird Trans-SheHumanoid-Former bike and the Hobbit feet surplus from Weta.
The Hunchback in 300 (Ephialtes of Trachis) and Vikram’s character in Ai look eerily similar.
Then, we have something which looks like a Kollywood “Semma Mass” version of Maurice Sendak’s Where the wild things are.
Tsk! Tsk!
Why can’t Shankar’s characters be as memorable and as original as his song picturisations?
I have no words to describe this – except WTF!
Every once in a while, I get to see a shameless rip-off which just gets me to add a new post on this blog which is full of cobwebs.
I absolutely love it when lazy creatives tweak classy originals to come up with derivative works and call them their own.
This one is a re-use of the poster for a 2010 movie “In My Sleep“. The Synopsis for In My Sleep from IMDB
In this edge-of-your-seat thriller, Marcus struggles with parasomnia, a sleepwalking disorder that causes him to do things in his sleep that he cannot remember the next day. When he wakes up with blood on his hands and a knife at his side, he is startled to hear that a close friend has been found stabbed to death. Marcus frantically tries to put the pieces together could he have murdered his friend while sleepwalking to hide a dark secret between them?
That explains the knife, fetal position, blood splotches, boxers & the wrinkle effect (of his bed spread).
The Tamil movie is very imaginatively titled Cellphone … or was it Cellbone. What cleared up the confusion was the killer of a tagline: Unknown Number. So, it was unlikely to be one of the 206 bones.
The Art Director has just borrowed the poster from In My Sleep and added a brown, earthy tint. He obviously chopped off the bottom part from the original so that he could accommodate the 10-15 people whose names and educational qualifications needed to be on the poster.
I am curious to see what this poster has to do with the story of the movie Cell Phone. My money is on the art director subtitling the poster, in a Magrittesque twist, with “This is not a knife – (but a cell phone)“.
The costume used by the Joker is what Devdas uses. EXACTLY the same one – same folds, same shoes, same cuffs – absolutely ridiculous.
UPDATE: This is a Fan Poster and the Original looks nothing like this. Hat-tip to Nosferatu
Hoodie: Borrow from MI-4
Falling Text: Old Matrix poster and more recently from MI-4 & TTSS
Such a shoddy job … Tcch. Tcch.
I had someone asking me the question a few days ago.
I recounted the story and I thought it would be nice to post the tale.
I also Quiz and am a member of the Quiz Foundation of India. In one of the quizzes, Vinod Ganesh a.k.a Mensa asked a stunner which was around the inspiration for the Poster of Brokeback Mountain
I was stumped and really enjoyed the question. That set me off on a movie poster inspirations trip for quite sometime – I discovered cool sources online like IMPAwards, MonkeyArtAwards and Orkaan . Somewhere along the way, I started off this blog after 2 failed attempts on creating or curating content online ( Intentionally Left Blank & Worst Videos Ever).
Then in 2009, I stumbled upon a brilliant blog run by Babu Kuriakose which somewhere got me wanting to do a little more. Babu’s blog had a lot of content which I liked and I realised while running through his blog that he worked right opposite my office. I reached out to him and we started catching up at the mobile tea shop (read pushcart) outside our offices. The period between Oct 2009 and May 2010 was full of brilliant discussions on Beatles, Movies, Music and obviously Movie Posters. It was almost like we were trying to inspire one another to make more connections on inspired posters. See more of Babu’s brilliance. Babu sadly is not blogging any more. I blog very infrequently. But, am inspired from time to time – a post or two happen – then – silence.
Why do I look at posters?
If I look at visual art in its current form, video is complicated and is transient – in terms of how long it physically is available & in vogue. Paintings by contemporary artists are devoid of detail and embellishment – atleast, they miss the simple things I like in paintings. Movie posters and in their crunched down avatar – DVD covers – are ubiquitous. Once I started digging, I found many similarities between Movie posters & Paintings – Posters feeding off paintings more than the reverse flow. My interest in Renaissance art & movies in general helped connect the dots.
There is very little difference between the posters showing the fist here – hand-drawn with Moustache and shaven with sunglasses.
And what is it with creative agencies wanting Akshay to burst out of every poster. Seriously.
Well, You burst on the scene already a legend, the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond (Apologies to Joan Baez)
Noticed this nice poster which thematically looks similar to the poster of Holes… which anyway reminds you of Taranino’s TrunkShot
Inspired Movie Posters 
