The 30 Worst Posters Of 2013

There have been many great posters this year – here are 50 of them, to get you started – but there have also been many terrible posters too. From characterless character banners to good ol’ fashioned Photoshop cock-ups, quite a few one-sheets have got the ignominious one star from Empire. Here are a few of our ‘favourites’.

AFTER EARTH

If you look closely, you can see that Will Smith and his son, Jaden Smith, don’t have 6-inch tower haircuts straight out of the ‘90s. If you don’t look closely – and why would you be looking closely, again? – they do. MAGIC!

AUGUST: ORANGE COUNTY

With a cast so strong (Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Benedict Cumberbatch) and a writer so well respected (award-winning playwright Tracy Letts), you’d hope for a better ensemble poster than this. It says nothing about the film itself, merely listing the cast and letting you know there’s a house involved. Admit it – if you had a few hours, chances are you could knock this up (the poster, not the house, that is).

THE BIG WEDDING

Another super-ensemble cast movie poster that should have looked at our ‘The Eleven Styles Of The Ensemble Movie Poster’ feature, this Big Wedding one-sheet is one Big Mistake. No-one laughing, frowning or smiling in this quad means it – though perhaps that has something to do with the Photoshop botox everyone’s been subjected to.

COMPULSION

Yes, that’s Heather Graham. You can tell, because it says her name at the top. If it didn’t have Heather Graham’s name at the top, you’d swear it was a creepy chef made out of Plasticine.

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

There’s so much love in the office for so many of the actors involved in this movie – Flight Of The Conchords’ Kristen Schaal, The O.C.’s Adam Brody and JCVD’s Jean-Claude Van Damme – but this poster is a several-heads-appearing-around-a-door-frame mess, with a tiger somehow crawling into the picture at the bottom and hell-knows-what on the far left. Nowhere near as good as Van Damme’s damn van trick.

DON JON

AKA ‘Don Jon gets masturbation wrong’. The table’s at an odd height (or Don’s chair is), the windows on his MacBook just look weird and… oh, that’s right, the computer is the wrong way round.

THE ENGLISH TEACHER

Balancing precariously on a pile of SERIOUSLY BIG BOOKS, Julianne Moore makes her second appearance on this list, only just failing to make it into our ‘Nondescript Indie’ subsection because of the sheer weirdness of this one-sheet. One important question: what are the chair’s back legs resting on?

THE FROZEN GROUND

John Cusack has spotted something crawling on the back of Nicolas Cage’s head, and he’s seriously worried about it. So much so, in fact, his face is starting to melt.

THE HOST

Four separate character posters here, mashed together into one regular poster. Unfortunately the two at the top, Saoirse Ronan and Jake Abel, see their legs fade into blackness, leaving their torsos sinking into the massive pupil behind them. That’s bad hosting, that is.

JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT

JOBS

If you squint, a bearded and bespectacled Ashton Kutcher does actually look a lot like Apple empresario Steve Jobs. Alas, this poster takes a perfectly decent snap of Twitter’s First Son and makes anyone looking at it feel like they’re on a psychotropic trip – which is probably not what the designers were going for.

THE LAST STAND

Like the film itself, you really want it to work, but it just doesn’t. Feeling half-finished and too explosion-from-a-gun-barrel heavy, it’s not entirely clear who is in this movie – aside from ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, of course.

MACHETE KILLS

This poster is an explosion in a fireworks factory, and not in a “Wow, would you look at that!” way. It’s nauseating, gaudy and just plain unpleasant, which really is an impressive trick when it features Amber Heard.

A MADEA CHRISTMAS

Ho. Ho. HOMIGOD GET IT AWAY FROM ME!

PARANOIA

Looking like a cross between The Matrix and Enemy Of The State, this poster is startlingly ‘90s (if you’re willing to accept ‘90s as an adjective). Harrison Ford’s withering stare seems to say it all: “Really? You’re actually thinking about watching this?”

PARKER

Learning the grand total of absolutely nothing from the mistakes made by X-Men: First Class’s poster design team – the horror, the horror – The Stath gets Jenny From The Block on his jacket, and it looks horrible. If Jennifer Lopez wasn’t ghosting through his lapel, this would be a genuinely decent poster. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

RUNNER RUNNER

If you believe this poster was shot with all three stars in the same room, all in front of a roulette table, you have indeed been played. Also, are those lights at the top or flames? Wait, the casino’s on fire! Run!

SCARY MOVIE 5

It’s scary, that’s for sure. Just look at that terribly Photoshopped tongue lolloping out of Katrina Bowden’s mouth (and into Sarah Hyland’s ear). The biggest waste here is not featuring Lindsay Lohan, who does good scary – see I Know Who Killed Me – and actually appears in the film.

THE WOLVERINE

Hugh Jackman’s second standalone outing as Logan-san had some great posters, some mediocre posters (see our pointless character one-sheets slide) and this, a truly dreadful attempt to recreate the front cover of a famous Wolverine comic book. This is what it was meant to look like – apparently.

PS. Notice how Wolverine’s head looks exactly the same in this other poster...

WORLD WAR Z

Here is the original still this poster used as its centrepiece. In it, you see Brad Pitt’s family huddling together; nothing is on fire, and there are no ropily-Photoshopped zombies in the background. They might have been better off just using the still.

THE HEAT

That said, after feeling – ahem – *the heat *from critics, they did fix it on the Blu-ray release. Hooray!

MOVIE 43

Look at Richard Gere’s face at the bottom left-hand corner of the UK poster for Movie 43. That’s how the world feels about this poster. For how the world feels about the film itself, take a look at our list of The Worst Movies Of 2013, where details can be found in abundance.

THOR: THE DARK WORLD

THE INTERNSHIP

PS Take note of the almost-too-subtle Wedding Crashers reference tagline – “They’re crashing the system!” – as well as the small Google + login in the top lefthand corner of the mirrored poster. Billy and Nick have few skills, but can navigate Google +? Impressive.

NONDESCRIPT AMERICAN INDIES

WHITE HOUSE DOWN TEASERS

POINTLESS CHARACTER BANNERS

MACHETE KILLS (AGAIN)

If you don’t approve of the whole bullet-firing breast thing, there’s also an alternate take with a pair of whips. Take that, Indiana Jones.