Poster Analysis - Suicide Squad

These three posters from the movie Suicide Squad, there are various features that these three posters have that conform to and subvert away from genre conventions.

Colour Scheme

There is a repetitive use of bright colours in the posters, I believe they’re used so that it can grab the attention of the audience. The colour scheme of blue, purple and green subverts away from typical action and thriller movies, they tend to use dark colours and this helps give the audience the nature of the movie will mainly be filled with violence, suspense and drama.

However, it can be understood why the colour scheme was used, blue, purple and green can be seen as playful colours since they’re bright, this nicely suits the genre of the movie as it contains comedic elements and it can also reflect on certain areas of the movie, for instance the colour green is associated with great healing powers, in the movie, the villains were used by the U.S Embassy for a secret mission in order to help stop another villain – this shows a link between the choice of colours.

The first poster on the other hand does conform to thriller/action movies as it is quite dark, dark red is associated with rage, leadership, and with that you can see that it was deliberate for the joker to be placed as the main character on the poster as he attempts to launch his own evil agenda.

Models and Shots

In the first poster it is obvious that the main attention has been bought to the Joker, this may be due to the fact that out of all the characters, the Joker more known by people, so therefore it’ll attract them more to watch the movie.

The Joker has his typical pale skin and green hair, and this time he is tatted-up, and with the mid shot, the mise-en-scene (including the facial expression) of the Joker can be recognised even more making him appear evil, as we usually picture him, his iconography of the guns shows that he a murderous character, and the bullets shown on the background and on him (visible around his chest area) shows how he’s invincible, and this is how we expect him to behave.

The second and third poster shows the whole squad all in costume (more visible in the second poster), they’re all dressed in weird costumes and they’re all positioned standing together, however, notice how the joker is standing on one of the X’s, this could help show that he has a completely different motive compared to the others, even though the joker is positioned by himself, we do see all the characters together, so this enables the audience to see what type of characters are together which helps give them an insight of what the movie should be based on.

Conventions

All three of the posters are able to tell the audience roughly when the movie is releasing, for instance, even though the first poster with the joker has the least detail, we are able to know that it will be released in 2016, and with the other two we know it will be released on August 5^th 2016.     We are able to see the main actors/actresses of the film, this will help attract the audience as they tend to put the names of the more popular actors/actresses up on the poster, so it’s all for publicity, help it become more appealing to the public.  All of the cast are dressed in character so it helps give a connection between the real people are the cartoons (since the characters are based on comic characters)