In the golden years of movie posters, the same ones that gave us masterpieces such as the posters of Back to the Future you hate Indiana Jones, another very successful film, Aliens, arrived in theaters with a totally black poster, with only the title and a short central tagline.
However, if you think that the Aliens poster was designed in this way to maintain a bit of mystery around the film, you are very wrong.
James Cameron revealed the story behind the strange Aliens poster
35 years after the theatrical release of Aliens: Final Showdown, it turns out that the film’s American poster was actually born out of a small argument between the director, James Cameron, and the head of marketing at 20th Century Fox; as told by Cameron himself in the book Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron (available for a few hours).
“… I went to the office of the head of marketing at 20th Century Fox, I literally met him on his last day at the office and his office was all wrapped up in a few boxes. It was his last meeting before he left his job. He was sitting at his desk and he had this little green plastic frog and he was squeezing a light bulb and making it jump around the desk. And I said, ‘What are you doing with the frog?’ And he said, ‘It’s my stress reliever frog.’
Then he said, ‘But I have a one-sheet for you. And he showed this one-sheet. I think you can find it online, some of these have leaked. And it was this horrible kind of mash-up photography. It looked worse than a Roger Corman one-sheet because, like me, Roger believed in a good one-sheet. Not good movies, but good one-sheets. And I looked at this thing and I held it in my hands and I said, “Oh, let me tell you exactly what I think of this paper”, and slowly I crumpled it (into) a ball and threw it in a corner. And he continued with the anti-stress frog. And I said, “Honestly, if I could choose between that piece of shit and just a full black frame, I’d go for the all black frame.” Someone then took the initiative and said “James Cameron wants everything black!” He didn’t understand what I was saying. So, if you’ve ever wondered why there was literally nothing on the Aliens poster, this is why. “
Absurd don’t you think?
