Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Obtaining Posters

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Posted by Sean Kapp (Member # 4839) on 10-09-2008, 01:19 PM:

Greetings all! Quick question, how do you go about obtaining posters for movies that have been out for a long time? In our case we are doing a week of classic horror movies at the end of the month.

Tentative titles include:
Army of Darkness
The Thing
The Shining
The Exorcist

Thanks in advance!

Sean

Posted by Tyler Potts (Member # 4952) on 10-09-2008, 01:34 PM:

Army of Darkness & The Thing: Universal
The Shining & The Exorcist: Warner Bros

You need to find your district's exhibitor services, all my contacts are southeast so that won't help. From there inform the reps with your publicity/promotions plans and they'll be able to help you from there.

Posted by Bill Gabel (Member # 1105) on 10-09-2008, 01:56 PM:

In the old days of National Screen Service (NSS), you could order those posters & trailers titles if you had a playdate for them. But older titles like you have the studios do not stock posters for them. eBay might be the best answer for those titles if you want posters.
When I was working for Warner Bros. in Burbank. The pubicity dept. needed a few poster titles for a few special screenings and asked if I would loan them to use at the theatres.

eBay is showing
Army of Darkness posters starting around $9.00
Shining posters starting around $10-20, with a high point of $124
Exorcist posters starting around $9-20
The Thing posters starting around $19, with a high point of $150

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 10-09-2008, 02:24 PM:

We did a showing of American Graffiti at our drive-in a few years ago. I wound up buying a poster from allposters.com or a similar site. And I'm fairly certain they used some kind of print on demand service.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 10-09-2008, 02:46 PM:

Allposters.com is good, also moviegoods.com. Moviegoods seems to have more older titles.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 10-09-2008, 03:34 PM:

I have pretty much given up trying to get theatrical posters from the distribs for their older classic titles. Trying to get them from collector type outlets can sometimes cost you more than the picture guarantee!

What I have taken to doing is getting images and graphics from anyplace I can on the internet and sometimes even getting the DVD or VHS jackts -- Laserdisc are especially good -- then scanning these at high rez my scanner. Put them in Photoshop or any good editor and manipulate as needed, enhance and add text, and then using the "poster" setting on the printer, outputing the image to an 3x3 planel which give you not quite a full 1sheet size, but impressive enough. You can even go larger, but depending on the source material, larger can cause the image to degrade too much. Nice thing about this is that you can customize your posters to include specific information for you playdate.

Do a couple of these and before you know it, you will be whipping out a very impressive looking poster in under an hour. I have gotten so good at cutting and pasting the panels that people standing two feet away can't tell they are not a single sheet of paper. Check this out"

And this:

which was redone as this:

Posted by Sean Kapp (Member # 4839) on 10-10-2008, 09:13 AM:

I made contact with WB, they of course do not have any. Thanks for the suggestions of the various websites.

I have access to a professional graphics designer. She has agreed to take this on as a pet project and come up with a 4-in-1 poster for us [Smile]

Only $35 to have it printed in size and awesome colors.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 10-10-2008, 02:29 PM:

....then sell it back to the WB classics dept for $100 or for letting you have the next rental for a flat rate! [thumbsup]

Posted by Andy Muirhead (Member # 712) on 10-10-2008, 07:42 PM:

There is great tool I sometimes use when I can't get posters which is called the 'Rasterbator'. You can get it here

There is an online version, but I always use the standalone app. It converts an image into a rastered form to any size you specify. I've used it before with great results.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 10-11-2008, 02:41 PM:

Andy, thanks big time, bro....that is an awesome program. It solves the problem of printes that have limited panel printing capabilities, not to mention that you could wallpaper the entire lobby with one of these posters!!

Posted by Jeremy Weigel (Member # 4208) on 10-11-2008, 07:13 PM:

Iconographics is a good place to get older posters.

Iconographics