When Bad Posters Strike: The Other Boleyn Girl (Part II)

aka, the "It just gets worse!" edition.

IMP informs us (as does JD, which I only realised after the fact - thanks though!) that the poster for the Portman-Johansson-Bana period flick The Other Boleyn girl wasn't quite the final design. I apologise to those who were responsible for the Boleyn poster because I gave them a shellacking for that one - it was really poor.

But, as I said, that poster is no longer the official design. Now we have a new one!


And this time... IT'S WORSE! Didn't think that was possible? Well, they somehow managed it. How? Well, for starters the dress that Natalie Portman is wearing (the one that takes is 75% of the poster space) has been changed from a royal deep green to some sort of ecstasy raver dayglo bullshit green and all three cast members now have really red skin. It's like they turned the contrast on the image up from "neutral" to "wow, I can, like, touch the sky and the clouds are made of fairy floss. whoa."

Then they also decided for some unknown reason to crop the outer edge of the design so now not only are their foreheads chopped off now audiences don't even get the advantage of being able to ogle Scarlett Johansson's cleavage. And now, more than ever, Eric Bana's mysterious tit-grabbing hand looks even more like somebody just grabbed a prop hand prosthetic from a horror movie set and attached it to Portman's shoulder.

It just feels like they only had one image and they accidentally cropped it in Photoshop and saved it and they couldn't undo it. Surely this poster is a perfect example of how not to market your sexy period film, right?

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.