Colour is one of the quickest ways a poster can tell you what kind of film it’s selling.
Before you’ve read the title or registered the actors, your brain has already clocked the palette and filed it against a lifetime of genre expectations.
Over the past century, marketing teams have shifted from painterly illustration to photography and from saturated Technicolor hues to today’s more controlled, strategic colour use.
I wanted to take a data-led look at colours on movie posters, so I gather a few (well, 58,687) and analysed how different kinds of movies make use of each colour.
Before we go colour-by-colour, let’s get a general sense of colourful movie posters are.
How colourful are movie posters?
The first measure I tracked was a ‘Colourfulness score’. This measures how intense and varied the colours are in a poster. Higher values mean the image contains more saturated and diverse colours, while lower values indicate a more muted or monochrome palette.
The image below shows a sample of images on the scale from 'low colourful scores on the left to highly colourful ones on the right.
With this we can track how movie posters have been changing over time. Movies posters cover the whole gamut but there has been a consistent trend of the colour coming out of posters.
Not very bright?
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