Classic Movie Posters

[Sean Falk]

We're playing some classic movies, like I assume most theatres open now are, until some new content comes out. Whats the best way to get posters for these?
We get all ours from Vision Media, but I doubt they have reprints in stock for the ~40 year old movies that we're playing, so I'm guessing if i want some reprints of these I'm gonna have to buy them. Any good and preferably cheap sources?

Also how are some of you that have opened dealt with posters being already out on streaming/being short on posters/having people confused about dates on posters?

[Jesse Crooks]

You could make your own in-house if you have a decent graphic designer on staff. We have some talented folks who do custom posters for some of our rep titles.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It's a mixed bag, but for classic movies I often see myself looking on sites like www.joblo.com. They have quite a collection of digital movie posters, not all of them in the best quality, unfortunately, but it depends on what you're going to use them for. If it's just digital advertising, it's mostly "good enough". As for the old release dates that are sometimes present: It doesn't take a lot of Photoshop skills to get rid of them, how professional it will look depends on your level of skill and amount of time you want to put in there.

But you can even ask your booker, in some rare cases the studio does have some actual high-quality digital marketing material at hand.

[Mark Lane]

I have had to purchase posters for older movies off eBay.

[Mike Blakesley]

I have a printer that does 13x19 sheets, so I download posters from the internet. I print on one sheet of paper (which is pretty small, but gets the message across), or if I'm ambitious, I'll use Photoshop to make a half-and-half poster out of two sheets. Uses a lot of ink but does the job.

At the end of the day, the marquee is more important than the poster. Get the movie name up there if you can.... that's really all it takes.

[Sean Falk]

Marcel, thanks for that site, perfect for what I was looking for.

We have poster cases for "Now Showing" and right now it just has the wrong posters in it. Our digital signage works automatically with our ticket system. I do have to make/adjust posters for our marquee, but that's usually not an issue (although joblo will probably be a good source for that too)

[James Waite]

There are a couple movie poster database websites that have fairly high-res versions of many posters if one has the ability to print it.