I have a bone to pick with studio marketing guys — if you’re making a romantic comedy and the best you can come up with is just putting your two stars on the poster kinda smiling and looking flirty, you probably really don’t have anything new in the genre, so why are even you making it? I mean other than the easy dollar? The latest example of the above phenomenon is The Back-up Plan with Jennifer Lopez and that CBS guy. Amy Adams had it with her Leap Year poster (at least it was green) but c’mon people — design something. Sell me on your idea. Sell me the high concept reason for your movie to be, give me something that makes me think this is gonna break out of the pack and be something worth seeing rather than just something to occupy 98 minutes and hopefully help me score, ya know?
I realize these things trend feminine, and that that is the basic mission statement — to appeal to girls, who will drag along the guy, to put his ass in the seat next to them. But the rom-com poster is by far the easiest poster genre to spoof. I’d been thinking about this as it relates to She’s Out of My League and a couple other films on the horizon, the former of which made a late attempt at mitigating Jay Baruchel’s wincing mug and all those complementary posters of dudes by adding the lovely Krysten Ritter to the promotional poster campaign. But it’s always sappy rom-com mock-ups that first get titters in movies about movies, before action poster spoofs, really. Because they so roundly evidence a complete lack of effort.