Film Posters Of The 80′s

• 12th Apr 2011

Edited by: Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh

The 80’s made everything looks so easy. Almost every genre here is a winner. I don’t recall seeing so many famous posters for comedy (The Breakfast club), Cop films (Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, 48Hrs) Kids films (E.T.) Drama (Rain Man), Sci-fi (Blade Runner, Terminator, Robocop, Escape From New York and a special Revenge of the Jedi poster!).

It’s a decade where art as poster imagery went to the mainstream and for the large part seemed to get it right. Poster artists defined many of their work by the content of the film. Few lies were told, making this one of the more honest decades in film poster art.

The slashers were doing well with memorable Friday the 13^th, Elm Street and even Evil Dead posters. Art came back with The Wall and Withnail and I. And yet art films got simplistic with the likes of The Big Blue.

Steven Soderbergh got his start with Sex, Lies and Videotape with a very late 80’s looking poster (you can tell it’s this period as the letters are all different colours). The drama-epic became just that with some very memorable posters for The Colour Purple, Out of Africa, Amadeus and The Last Emperor.

War became a common theme in the 80s and hits like Platoon, First Blood, Full Metal Jacket and Good Morning Vietnam got their right ad campaigns.

Bond is still here obviously – but he got some serious competition from Indiana Jones in both the quality of the films as well as the ad campaigns!

Still room for gags on posters with the birth of the spoof (Airplane!, Naked Gun, Top Secret) as well as American comedy from the Saturday Night Live players (Fletch, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters).

But let’s not forget that it was DeNiro who took over  the world– naturally it’s good to see some Untouchables, Raging Bull and also the beautiful Once Upon A Time In America poster.

http://www.reelposter.com/books.php

Steven Hurst