Hmm. I can agree with the list art of movie posters, but I disagree with the screenshotted comments, and … I think it’s an age-related thing.

When I was growing up, and as a younger adult, I was always amazed how the adults weren’t aware of the common pop culture references I knew - the biggest singers and the hit songs that were getting all the airtime, the big current or upcoming movies and their favorites backstories (much less the lesser known releases!), current trends and whatever spawned them, etc. When I was younger, I knew all that stuff and it was incomprehensible that there were all these adults wandering around who were just … unaware of it all.

And now, as an older adult, I’m paying more attention to a wider world. Yes, there are still movies and music and pop culture, but I’m also much more aware of and tracking much more complex issues that I wasn’t aware of (or at least not paying much attention to) when I was younger. How a drought years ago and the pandemic and the cutting of international funds are responsible for higher beef prices today. A more detailed geopolitical explanation of Russia wants Crimea, Ukraine, and other buffer states. Overfishing and it’s implications for global food supply. The oncoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and a few of it’s likely effects.

My time and attention are limited in a way that I didn’t (and couldn’t!) appreciate when I was younger. So yeah, I’m at a point where I’ll pay more or less attention to a movie depending on the things that I might randomly come across. It might the the poster, it might be an ad or preview, it might be word of mouth, it might be the actors or director or film genre. It’s not that I’m stupid, it’s that a lot of my time and attention are elsewhere - as is the time and attention of many people in this slowly-deteriorating, increasingly-stressful world.

If your life allows you the leisure to fully appreciate the potential of a movie based on stylized movie posters, I’m delighted that you have that space and ability. As an older person who has too many things competing for their attention, I’m in the camp where I’ll make a judgement based on a poster. If I’m not into gore and horror, your spoof gorey-poster of your comedy film is going to make me turn away instead of looking closer. If I’m not interested in animation, or romance, or “old people” films, or science fiction, or westerns, or foreign language films, or whatever, and your poster presents that to me, then I’m more likely to give your film a miss.

I’d also argue that this is the point of movie posters: not necessarily to grab the attention of people who are already interested in that genre, who will likely already be hearing about the film and it’s background, but to attract the interest of those who are less interested in the genre and won’t necessarily have heard about the film, but who can be persuaded to watch. By going after that audience, the poster maker may be making less visually interesting images, but they’re doing their job by going after the “willing to be sold on this” audience.

I’d also argue that the lack of artistic posters problem goes back to the studios and the distributors. With the granularity of marketing insights today, there’s absolutely no reason they couldn’t run multiple movie posters, each aimed at a different audience. The problem is that the studios and distributors aren’t willing to risk money on audience-specific targeted advertising, they’d just rather have one major ad campaign for everyone.

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. - Johnathan Swift

You multiply that by how many true geniuses are actually in the world, and that will explain why there’s such an enormous confederacy of dunces.