Yes, movie posters famously rely on cliches: there are many collages of them compiled by Christophe Courtois (his site is in French) that made the rounds of various culture/media/design blogs back in 2011. I saw them on Flavorwire, and they're all worth a look. This one is probably my favorite because of the completely genuine, not-sarcastic caption:
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| Flavorwire's caption reads: "If someone is running down the street, that street should probably be blue. Also your movie should probably be some kind of thriller. |
But! When Schaefer writes that "film posters [are left by designers] to often be overlooked or decried as 'typically mediocre and mired in cliched imagery that unimaginative marketers think will pique an audience's interest,'" he could be talking about many a book cover. Haven't we looked at a number of tropes and cliches of book design here in class? Here's another collage from the same list:
Now, that looks kind of familiar, no? That one-eye technique is used on a lot of book covers, too. So, I guess my point is that while I often like the design of a book cover over the poster for a movie based on the book, both types of design have certain tropes/cliches for a reason. In both cases, these elements signal to the viewer (probably often unconsciously) what kind of book or what kind of movie this will be. Yes, that can be a big problem--it often limits the audience instead of inviting more people in, and often stories are misrepresented in an attempt to market them. But in both movies and in publishing, there's probably not one person making the design decisions for the cover/poster. In books, there's a whole line of people the designer has to answer to, not the least of which is the marketing department, and while I know less about the organizational structure of movie production companies, I'm relatively certain the same thing is true there.
From the few accounts I've read by designers of movie promo materials, they're often brought in at the last minute, after someone else has taken promo photographs of the movie's stars (many of whom probably have very specific clauses in their contracts about how they can or cannot be portrayed not just in the movie but also in the print/promo packages, I'd bet) and maybe even after trailers have already been released. In that situation, it would probably be difficult to do something unexpected, which seems to be a problem with the movie industry in general, and leads me to my next idea: while the medium of movies may be newer and flashier, I think the movie industry might be more conservative than book publishers, which is saying something, as publishing has always been considered quite conservative in terms of what houses will spend money on. Publishers traditionally only put money into books they know will make it back, but that, like everything else publishing, is probably in flux right now; when you consider the much higher cost of producing a movie v. printing a book, it doesn't seem surprising that movie production companies are even less likely to invest in something really creative and different--hence, movies that rely on cliches being promoted by posters that rely on cliches. Even movies made from books often make departures from the source material due to economic concerns on the part of the producers.
Back to the visual comparison, though. While novel covers are representing a narrative in language, which allows for the reader to imagine the visuals, movie posters are representing a visual narrative. So, it would be somewhat disingenuous not to use some element of the visuals from the movie in the poster, no? That doesn't mean it's a great design decision just to slap a floating head of the main character/movie's star on the poster, but I do think a movie's poster should reflect the visual style of the movie in the same way that a book cover should represent the narrative style or the characters' reality in some evocative, perhaps less literal way (again, leaving the work of interpretation up to the reader).
Ultimately, I do think the movie industry could learn a few things from book covers because book designers seem to have more faith in readers than production companies have in viewers. Yes, movies are a more passive way to experience a narrative than novels--you don't have to put any effort into them and can just sit back and absorb, which you can't do while reading--, but that doesn't mean that viewers have to be handed a cheat sheet in the form of the poster. So, as just about always with design, I think you have to compare the design to the narrative and see if the design is meeting its responsibilities to the reader/viewer, the writer/director, and the publisher/production company.
Both of these use tropes, but I found them both to be successful because they are representative of their respective texts and are visually engaging:
