When Bad Posters Strike: The Other Boleyn Girl

I've seen some shoddy photoshopping in my time (considering "my time" is about double the amount time that Photoshop has existed, but that's not the point) but the newly released (via) poster for The Other Boleyn Girl is just a bloody piss poor effort, don't you think?


Let's begin by pointing out the strange way the poster scalps all three of it's main castmembers heads off. It's not like they don't have plenty of space to move the poorly arranged cast down a centremetre or two. I keep trying to scroll the image up but I can't and it's bugging the hell outta me.

Now we can move along to the fact that whoever designed this didn't even attempt to make it appear as if these three people (Scarlett Johansson, Eric Bana and Natalie Portman, obviously) were photographed together. Instead it looks as if they just got screengrabs of Scarlett and Eric and haphazardly arranged them around an image of Natalie Portman. An image, which it much be said, features Portman striking a very similar pose to another regal movie poster. And then they edited in Bana's mysterious tit-grabbing hand for added... allure?

I'm not entirely sure what exactly happened to this movie. It was originally set for release this year, but - as the poster says there at the bottom - it is now set for release in, of all months, February. A historical period film based on a famous novel being released in February? Bizarre, but true. The cast gives off the illusion of being hip and sexy (and, the more said about Eric Bana's pants the better) and Portman's name along with the prestige of the book gave it an allure of quality - I even had it down for several Oscar nominations including Best Actress for Portman in my year-in-advance predictions - but somewhere along the way I think it went over the rails, it got bumped for whatever reason to a dead zone of February and now it seems the marketing is getting off to a decidedly shaky start with this strangely cobbled together poster.

I just wish they didn't cut off their scalps like they did. Perhaps I wouldn't feel as negative towards it. It's just so... aah! Perhaps Portman's forehead extends for kilometres and kilometres. I guess we'll never know.

To see more of this series simply click the "When Bad Posters Strike" tag below.