Movie poster colors through history

Vijay Pandurangan visualized the colors found in movie posters since 1914. Would you look at all that teal? Thanks, Hollywood complementary color voodoo! [via Explore]

• [retchdog]

  so how did the movie posters of 1920-21 predict the future? temporal disturbance caused by the end of wwi?

  • [sam1148]

    I’d guess the data was collected from archival prints. Some of the colors on old prints  shift to blue over time even with good storage.

• [Ryan Holmes]

  I’d love to hear a corresponding analysis from someone in the industry. Im also reminded that A LOT of comedy movie posters are white with red type.

• [EH]

  You can see the increase in blues and decrease in reds, corresponding to the Teal-Orange Era:

  http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html

• [Marc Mielke]

  What happened in 1924?

  • [Aeron]

    We don’t talk about 1924.

    • [bluest_one]

      [Subject provides evidence of faking unawareness. Tagged for rectification processing]

  • [bluest_one]

    [Subject provides evidence of awakening. Tag subject for rectification processing]

    • [awjt]

       [Meta-poster's rectum tagged for rectification processing.]

• [RuthlessRuben]

  Call me a Renegade, but I actually like Teal and Orange. It’s like Gin and Tonic to me.

• [scav]

  I wish IMDB would let you search by year…

  … or by colour of movie poster actually.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    You can search by decade, or you can click the year next to any title to get the most popular films from that year. I think that there used to be a better “year’ search tool.

  • [Andrew Rockefeller]

    1,578 titles for the year 1924…
    http://www.imdb.com/search/title?year=1924,1924&title_type=feature&sort=moviemeter,asc

  • [Henry Pootel]

    They should chat with the Etsy search people (
    http://www.etsy.com/color.php?ref=fp_nav_colors)

• [Rider]

  The sample sets  used are insanely small for anything from before the 70′s.  Pretty meaningless.  

• [Sarah Dearne]

  This is really cool! Interesting that teal shades have become more popular.

• [ImmutableMichael]

  I see they are becoming increasingly blue-shifted and accelerating towards us at growing rates. Some sort of dark energy is probably at work, probably James Cameron.

  • [SomeGuyNamedMark]

     All movie ideas are collapsing to a singularity

• [Eric Harshbarger]

  How cool. And for me very coincidental as just this weekend I made a chart that illustrates the past 30 years of movies that mention colors in  their titles:

  http://www.ericharshbarger.org/movies/colors_in_titles.html

• [Shawn H Corey]

  It shows hue but not saturation or value. It can answer questions like how much black was used in the posters?