Key Elements
Rambo: Action is the key selling point of this and all Rambo movies. Little verbiage, other than the word Rambo, is used on the poster because everyone knows that Sylvester Stallone is Rambo. This poster conveys a sense of impending violence and the overall gray/brown color scheme gives the viewers a feeling of moral neutrality in the nature of the violence. In addition, Rambo is carrying a hand held weapon there by implying that the violence, this time, is going to be up front, bloody and personal.
Vantage Point: The movie poster is made up from a series of thumb nail pictures in the shape of a gun carrying man. It portrays a sense of confusion, mystery and suspense as well as doing a good job of forcing viewers to stop and stare at it for a bit to figure out what they are looking at. The thumb nail pictures are interestingly arranged in a manner that reveals Little about the story and cleverly mirrors the confusing nature of the film. Although there are a number of well known actors in the film, none of them are given prominence in the poster. The collage carries the mystery of the film and the poster is designed to purposefully leave out any single headliners.
Genre
Rambo: With out a doubt, the Rambo poster portrays an action movie all the way. A big muscle bound man hulking about carrying a weapon with lots of dark shadows covering up parts of him. You can't beat that for impending violence and it sells the genre well. However, one could argue that there is a small element of the adventure genre to it as well. Sly does, after all, go to a foreign country first before he starts killing thousands of people.
Vantage Point: This movie poster sells the suspense genre big-time. Nothing in he poster is clear cut. You have multiple thumb nail pictures from multiple angles in a collage setting in the outline of a man with a gun. The gun aspect gives the suspense genre its edge by implying an unknown level of danger. Because of the more ambiguous nature of suspense movies, and the more low key nature of their release, this poster was probably more important to its marketing success than the Rambo poster was to the Rambo movie.
Audience
Rambo: This is an interesting question because at first glance you would presume the poster was targeting the young male teenage audience. However, because of the long standing, and well known nature of this particular series, and because of the market draw of the main actor, who is inseparable from the main character, we believe the movie poster is actually targeting a much broader audience that has grown up with the Rambo character or who at least is familiar with Sylvester Stallone.
Vantage Point: Because the poster does not have any noticeable hooks for a particular demographic and because suspense moves in general are targeted towards large audiences we believe Vantage Point is also a general audience film. Little pre-publicity was generated for this movie so the poster was one of the main selling points. We suspect that the poster designers paid special attention into not biasing the movie towards any given audience and purposefully gave the poster a safe neutral feel.
Tagline
Rambo: There is no tagline as such; however, the word Stallone is printed in big lettering above the movie title. Because Sly is so inseparable from this role you could construe that this is the tagline. Being the last chapter in the Rambo series must have been seen as enough to sell the film so the poster makers simply put the actor's name, the movie title and the state date on the movie poster and that was it.
Vantage Point: This poster does have a tagline, and like the graphics, is designed to elicit a sense of suspense. It complements the confused collage nature of the graphics and helps draw the viewer into the "Vantage Point" world. The tagline sets the movie patrons up by telling them right off that there are "8 strangers, 8 points of view, 1 truth". Nice suspenseful pull in.
Erika, Rollie, William
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