Poster Analysis

Film Posters have a clear commercial purpose - to promote a film. When creating a film poster it is important that we consider how well it fulfills its purpose advertising the film to the target audience.

Conventions of a film poster displayed in this example:

Tagline- pulling the audience in. "He was the perfect weapon until he became the target"

Title- "The Bourne Identity"

Credits- Cast, crew, production companies etc.

A main duty of a film poster it to reach out to the correct audience, this is done by clearly establishing what genre the film is. Taking "The Bourne Identity" as an example, we can already tell from the poster that it is a crime thriller due to the presence of a fingerprint, which connotes criminal activity. This is en example of iconography, which is recurring symbolic images that are closely linked to specific genres. 

Due to the main feature of the poster being a male running whilst under the cross hairs of a sniper scope, audiences can also assume that this is a man-on-the-run film. 

We can deduce from the poster that the main character leads a very isolated life as he is surrounded by nothing, in the smaller images we see he is engaged in a fight, which conveys that this is also an action film. The image of him kissing a woman possibly helps reach to a further audience who might interpret a slight romance which may run through the film. This may be to show that this is a "female friendly" film as stereotypically women are more likely to be interested in seeing a film with romance, therefore couples could be a possible audience that they are reaching out to as most of the rest of the iconography denotes that this is a "guys film" with lots of action, combat and weapon use. Or conversely it may just be there to show the presence of a young attractive female actress which will also please the general male audience.

At the top of the poster there is the name of the leading actor Matt Damon who is a very respected and established actor, the presence of his name helps to sell the movie further as many fans of Damon are likely to see this and go to see the film. The film title itself speaks volumes as it coincides with Charles Derry's thriller sub-genre of "the thriller of acquired identity", although not something the average movie-goer would identify, they would still be aware of the type of movie this is. Costume of the lead character is all black, which suggests he is trying to hide, the presence of the gun in his hand supports the other hints of action within the film and perhaps his role as an antagonist. The background has a digital tone to it and so helps to convey that the film is set in the modern day. Overall this film poster is successful in explicitly showing what type of movie it is and drawing a potential audience in.