Film Poster Tagline Research

What are taglines?

Taglines are used in all aspects of the corporate package such as the trailer, teaser poster, theatrical poster and other promotions to create a sense of continuity. The tagline emphasise a point or highlight a plotline, sometimes they can be a direct quote from the film allowing it to become a sort of catchphrase. The tagline is designed to be memorable so audiences associate the tagline with the film. I will use a tagline on the poster and in the trailer to create a holistic understanding of the film and to give the audiences extra information. Some posters use more than one tagline to add even more suspense, taglines are also generally placed at the top or bottom of the poster to not give lie to the image and title.

Generic Taglines of different genres:

Comedy: comedy taglines are obviously intended to make the reader laugh, its purpose is to reflect the genre of the film. They tend to portray information about the character, almost like a summary of their personality. Frequent comedy films use innuendos for their taglines, for example the new 'TED 2' films tagline is 'ted is coming, again'. For example the tagline for the film 'Johnny English' is a humorous character summary playing on the taglines popularised by the Jamed Bond franchise.

Action: action film taglines are often dynamic and refer to the 'masculinity' of the film, it refers to the danger the character may face in the film, or is simply a description of the plot. Often the tagline is very simple as action posters tend to rely purely on the visuals to gain audience attraction. The poster for the new die hard film features a pretty explanatory tagline "like father. like son. like hell", this is an obvious synopsis of the film, the tagline is located at the bottom of the poster to allow the visuals to come into full view (primarily due to the star cast)

Generic Taglines of different genres:

Romantic comedy/romance

Romance and romantic comedy posters tend to play with the generic stereotypes of men and women. Thye often describe the man or woman in question and refer to the relationships they are having, they tend to be comical and refer to some sort of disaster in a relationship. The tagline for the Bridget Jones poster states 'big lawyer, big liar, big dilemma' with each phrase pointing to the character in question, this pinpoints the characters personality. he tagline in the poster of the film Definitely Maybe connotes to the image 'three relationships, three disasters' link to the images of the three women at the top of the page.

Horror

Horror posters tend to feature scary, thought provoking taglines that can sometimes be a little cliché, perhaps this is due to the most famous taglines coming from horror films, such as 'in space no one can hear you scream' from the film Alien or 'they're back' from poltergeist 2. These taglines are designed to evoke fear, impending doom or a certain problem. They often feature frequent puns and play on words, such as 'coming ready or not' fro, the film 'hide and seek'.