From Con Air to Oppenheimer, we chart the evolution of the bro movie poster

Last summer, there was a war between ‘guys’ and ‘girls’. Barbenheimer meant a clash between pink and red spread across cinemas and over a thousand memes which said “this is what girls like,” and “this is what boys like,” and they weren’t far wrong. The majority of people who bought an Oppenheimer ticket worldwide were male; the film joins other majority-male crowd pleasers of recent years like Sisu, a 2022 Finnish historical thriller about a violent gold prospector, with a 71 per cent male audience; John Wick Chapter 4, with a 69 percent male audience; and Civil War, Alex Garland’s dystopian military tale, whose opening weekend success was driven by men.

Put like that, it’s no headline news: men are going to the cinema to watch blockbuster films. The key art (meaning posters, teaser artwork and any other promo material created to market a movie) looked typical to this genre, too. Three out of these four posters, for example, featured versions showing a lone man ‘against it all’, and the other, Civil War, showed a catastrophe in camo – just like The Day After Tomorrow 20 years before it, Lady Liberty is depicted in dystopian collapse (in fact, A24 even controversially used AI-generated imagery to create scenes that aren’t in the film, to ham up this action spectacle). Across the board, tough, reserved coolness is present across each poster, a tone that has never expired in male-marketed media.

Still, the characters in these films appear to be in a moment of in-between. In 2022, the Bond producers said they’d be adding more emotional sensitivity to upcoming films, to mirror how men at large were evolving. Equally, the exploration of male fragility in cinema is growing, with Nicholas Barber dubbing 2023 as the year “toxic masculinity dominated cinema” in the BBC. The question is, do we see the same changes happening in the key art? Are we designing for men differently today than we did in the past?

In the 1990s and early 2000s, movie posters for men used to be so ‘masculine’ they were almost camp. Masculinity, in a more muscular, rough-and-tumble sense, was in, and posters leaned towards flamboyant thematic interpretations with greater gusto. Take Con Air, with its title typeface set in a literal red-hot branding iron complete with metallic eagle; or Spawn, a superhero film with an almost pitch-black poster; or Demolition Man, which looks something akin to the 2010s Math Lady meme. Across multiple genres (from crime to thriller to fantasy), colourways were darker, more posters were set at night, motion blur was in abundance, and sodden white vests were big.

From the early 2000s to today, the frequency of vests decreased and so did most of these zealous, almost comical presentations of manliness. “For a male lead character to connect now I think he has to have a lot of depth,” says Sam Ashby, a key art designer who also runs and edits Little Joe, the queer film journal. “He can’t be a one-dimensional himbo and go around shooting stuff. I think he has to have a tragic past; he has to respect women, whilst still probably fucking loads of women. For me that’s really led to a huge shift in terms of how men are presented on these posters.”

While Sam, like me, laments the death of this old full-throttle approach – “I do think there’s a distinct lack of humour in today’s action movie posters, and miss the old days when all we needed was Stallone and Snipes and a poorly composite image of action heroes facing off” – he also thinks their retirement is the natural order in “a world in which toxic masculinity is thankfully no longer acceptable”.

When you look at more recent action movie posters, say of the past five years, there is an abundance of new trends. The hand-painted poster is one example. This visual device is being used more regularly by modern-day bro movie marketers to conjure images of figures like Han Solo, with the 80s themselves becoming a popular trope in film design. Ready Player One, Once Upon a Time and The Fall Guy are all examples of films that have used paint strokes to suggest a kind of earnest, nostalgic heroism. “I think that is such a kind of shorthand for a particular type of masculinity,” says Sam.

Similarly, as characters showing traditional morals rise in popularity – we’re reminded of franchises like Peaky Blinders – nostalgic and composed design has become a popular design language in film again, evidenced in titles like Wrath of Man and Argylle. On the flip side, a handful of films are rallying against traditional morals. A more explosive design language has erupted out of left field, splicing together notes from fantastical comic book franchises like Deadpool and Tarantino films, with acid colours and irreverent imagery showing up in the DNA of wider action posters like Nobody and Sisu. If this graphic signature had something to say, it would be a big middle finger, thrown up in any and all directions.

At the very same time, it seems emotional complexity is also becoming a reference that informs design decisions. There are fewer men jumping through air in moments of action and more moments of “sensitivity” in posters, as Sam points out, with men “often seen from behind” or “looking into the distance”. Sam gives the cast promo material for F9 as an example, where Vin Diesel is pictured at sunset with his back to camera, having traded in the wheel for a much-needed rest on the bonnet. Vulnerability is the secret sauce in a poster for Logan too, which shows no part of Hugh Jackman other than his hand, as he guides a young child from danger.

Today, it’s clear that there are a broader variety of competing key art styles playing out across the action film market – with many often repeating themselves. Though the rationale behind these visual choices is not always clear cut.

To understand why action posters might look and act the way they do, we need to ask how they’re designed. At the bigger end of the budget scale, most key art is “done by advertising agencies,” says Quentin Coulombier, a type designer who mainly works for cinema. “It’s not a gesture from an author.”

This, obviously, impacts how they look. A great, simple example is the design rules that are imposed through legal fine print. In the poster for the inaugural Fast and the Furious, for example, Vin Diesel’s head and Paul Walker’s head are exactly the same size, while Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster’s heads are smaller, positioned further away from ‘camera’. Design decisions like this can often be stipulated contractually. Sam says that characters who are further down the billing are typically given less physical space on the poster; you can often see how important a character or actor is to the film based on their head size.

The production behind key art can also lead to aesthetic homogeneity. Sam, who has held positions at almost every rung of the ladder in the key art space – both at major studios like Empire and as a freelancer – says it comes down to how blockbuster key art is commissioned. For a major American film studio, looking to commission an upcoming title, “usually, there’ll be quite an in-depth briefing doc, often shared on Google Slides, so they can pull in lots of references,” he says. Pages of target audiences – location, gender, age – will be linked to other previously successful films in those markets as well as, you guessed it, the posters of those films.

“On the more indie end of the scale, the poster for The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos just appears in like every fucking reference ever for an indie arthouse film,” says Sam. “On the more mainstream end, there will be a huge variety of posters of varying degrees of quality. Often, they just put them in because the film was successful and they weren’t really understanding what it is about that poster that works or doesn’t work.”

Just like the use of well-known franchise IP is used to make new films (Wizard of Oz becomes Wicked, and so on), previously successful films beget more films with similar key art. It’s like marketing evolution; if a movie is successful, the next generation of species adapts themselves, shortening their tail or developing fins, in a desperate attempt to survive. “[When designing] you have to give people a little bit of a taste of what they know and a little bit of what they don’t,” says Quentin. “But when it’s advertising, it’s 100 per cent the taste of what people know, because they cannot take the risk.”

So when an agency decides what to actually put on a poster today, they have to do several things at once. They have to take into account how to advertise the film, often by showing it through the lens of what audiences have enjoyed in the past – hence the different ‘groups’ of bro visual trends. These agencies also have to consider the cultural landscape to ensure broad appeal. When it comes to action films, this could mean how the public feels about masculinity at large.

We can see this playing out in practice visually. As conversations concerning toxic masculinity rise, depictions of more sensitive male figures rise (like Bond’s rebrand) and one-dimensional depictions of gender become less permissible in key art. We run into more interesting complications when we also consider the amount of people who view “traditional masculinity as being under threat” today – a 2022 Ipsos study put it at nearly half of all American men. To appease both sides of this coin, agencies have to split their focus. A male protagonist on a poster in 2024 is now more likely to represent multiple ideals: the strength of an action figure, and the sensitivity of a ‘real good guy’. It’s a lot to fit onto one poster. But more importantly, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for play.

Back in 2017, a film poster for Spider-Man: Homecoming was released that received backlash for its quality, with one Twitter user imagining the file name for the poster as looking something like “SpideyRoughLayoutDONOTSEND.psd”. The concept artist Tommy Lee Edwards said the poster looks “unfinished” in The Verge, but really the problem was that the poster resembled a poster only when you squint – there were no risks taken or discernible design concepts to be found. This moment, however isolated, speaks to a larger problem in action-film design: it’s boring.

This is a tragedy when we consider the legacy of silly action posters of the past. Cast your eyes across dramatic key art examples like Days of Thunder, and it’s easy to see the potential to invoke this language, and take it somewhere new. We saw the fun to be had in this last year with Barbie. In 2023, girl design, as Elizabeth Goodspeed wrote on our platform, went “semi-viral”; functionality was cast aside in favour of pushing gendered aesthetics to their furthest possible point, essentially becoming spoof.

Of course, context is important, and bro design is marred with its own set of concerning contexts, with visuals often informed by misogynistic or homophobic structures. But when we reference aspects from our visual history, in this case, the history of action films, we don’t have to follow the way they originally behaved. In fact, we can use design to undermine the power of old, outdated, even harmful imagery, just like Barbie set out to do.

Some film designers are already beginning to weave in references from bro film history in unexpected ways. Quentin recently worked on a brief for a drama romance film. But rather than looking to the visual cues of rom-coms, he called upon the typography typically associated with action movies. “The references were movies with Bruce Willis with big explosions,” he says. Quentin compares this way of designing to cooking. Sometimes he’ll “pour a bit of lemon juice into a recipe”, to create a new direction and “stimulate the flavour perceptions”. Perhaps that’s all blockbuster action movie posters today need: a bit more lemon juice.