Movie site Mubi makes the argument that there is a surprising uniformity to the poster designs for many recent high school comedies and quirky indie films, one that might be traced back to the 2004 quirky indie high school comedy “Napoleon Dynamite”:
“[A] cut-and-paste combination of photographs of actors surrounded by absent-minded doodles (and preferably on a backing of lined or graph paper) has become de rigeur for advertising high school comedies. It’s also become a staple of the quirky urban indie (and occasional doc) where the protagonists are set against whimsically sketched city skylines. And of course hand lettered title treatments are also mandatory…”
I think I was somewhat aware this was the case but seeing all of these collected together brings the trend into sharp relief.
Of course, that’s not to say that this trend is bad. This hand-drawn quality is certainly a step up in imagination from the otherwise dominant trend of floating heads in movie posters.
See more examples and read Mubi’s full write-up at their blog.
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