Today's News: Spidey slinging into more action on novel poster threesome

Here's some more MS news for ya:

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/152901/nieuwe_posters_voor_the_amazing_spider-man_2

The marketing campaign for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 continues to throw more goodies our way in rapid pace, even though the release of the film is still a good three point five months away. I must say, I both love and hate this particular set of posters. I like the dynamic pose of the protagonists on these, rather reminiscent of actual comic book cover art, especially the one showing Spidey in typical web slinging fashion (top). They're bound to get more enthusiastic attention than the rather dull posters of Sam Raimi's trilogy of movies, which in typical Hollywood fashion showed just a bunch of heads, or at best, a full shot of Spider-Man in a fairly energetic posture. The poster that shows an extreme close-up of Spider-Man's mask with a reflection of an angry Electro in his eye (bottom) certainly can be taken as a nod to some of the posters of the predecessors, where you would have the identity of the movie's main antagonist revealed in a similar fashion, except much smaller.

However, I'm bugged by the laziness of these posters, applying the same elements in slightly different order and size. Whereas there's a respectable diversity in the way the titular character is displayed, you'll notice Electro assumes an identical pose on all three one-sheets, as the exact same piece of imagery is used. A similar thing is happening with the video boards on all three posters, showing the same characters in precisely the same shots. It's like some member of the promotional team just had him/herself a ball photoshopping these posters by rearranging the way said elements are portrayed, the only piece showing any originality being our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man himself. Given there's still three months of marketing to be done, you wonder whether releasing a single new poster of Spidey versus Electro would not have sufficed for now, so more money and attention could be spend on following posters showing Rhino and Green Goblin too (even though there's a hint at the Goblin present here, poor Rhino is totally neglected on these posters!). Assuming such posters won't be released later on, which remains to be seen as this film's promotional campaign seems to go all-out. Even though the blatant similarities on these posters are kinda disappointing for movie/comic nerds nitpicking at home on their computers for lack of existential purpose, it probably won't matter where theater marketing is concerned. I doubt many theaters, save for the really big ones, will get all three of these anyhow, considering there's been a few TAS-M2 (much shorter!) posters released already - though at my theater we didn't receive any yet - and I doubt these will be the last of them. Besides, it's only posters: it's the actual movie that counts. I'm certainly looking forward to it, though I'm kinda hesitant about the presence of three baddies (plus hints to various others) all in a single film. Didn't work out so well the last time...