By The machine don’t sleep, and to that point, some new one-sheets were released for Spider-Man: Far From Home. Captain Marvel‘s been out for two and a half weeks and Avengers: Endgame is due out in one month, but Marvel (and Papa Mouse) are still making sure you know Spidey is on the horizon. Literally. Fair enough, you must market your upcoming movies, but the latest Spider-Man flick already has trailers and posters out and this latest iteration does nothing to further the storyline of where the character is headed.
We know Spidey’s headed on a European vacation. So, putting Spidey in a Spidey pose, reading a guidebook underneath a bridge isn’t revelatory. Maybe it’s tongue in cheek, playful even, but it does little to build more hype. Then there’s the fact that while the guidebook helps define the image and its themes, it’s not realistic. Are you telling me that Spidey doesn’t have a smart phone in his tights? Maybe a picture of Spidey taking a selfie on a gondola in one of Venice’s watery streets? There are other ways to get it done.
All in all, this feels like an indulgent doubling down on the movie’s titular angle of Spidey being far from home. But, you know, he went to Washington in the first film. He’s currently somewhere in space post-Infinity War / pre-Endgame. He’s always far from home isn’t he? If you can’t offer more than Spider-Man traveling as the payoff for the latest movie, I’m not sure what we should be getting hyped for, especially when this is the promo in the latest one sheet, not the initial tease.
Obviously, poster’s don’t need to feature spoilers, or even broad hints about what’s to come in a movie, but they should serve the purpose of increasing anticipation. Sometimes that’s achieved through simply great design. But this poster really doesn’t do either. It’s just your basic finger pointing to the fact that the movie’s still coming–that there’s more Marvel post-Avengers.
Even Chevy Chase’s European vacation poster from the eighties did it better on both fronts.
