To understand why action posters might look and act the way they do, we need to ask how they’re designed. At the bigger end of the budget scale, most key art is “done by advertising agencies,” says Quentin Coulombier, a type designer who mainly works for cinema. “It’s not a gesture from an author.”

This, obviously, impacts how they look. A great, simple example is the design rules that are imposed through legal fine print. In the poster for the inaugural Fast and the Furious, for example, Vin Diesel’s head and Paul Walker’s head are exactly the same size, while Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster’s heads are smaller, positioned further away from ‘camera’. Design decisions like this can often be stipulated contractually. Sam says that characters who are further down the billing are typically given less physical space on the poster; you can often see how important a character or actor is to the film based on their head size.

The production behind key art can also lead to aesthetic homogeneity. Sam, who has held positions at almost every rung of the ladder in the key art space – both at major studios like Empire and as a freelancer – says it comes down to how blockbuster key art is commissioned. For a major American film studio, looking to commission an upcoming title, “usually, there’ll be quite an in-depth briefing doc, often shared on Google Slides, so they can pull in lots of references,” he says. Pages of target audiences – location, gender, age – will be linked to other previously successful films in those markets as well as, you guessed it, the posters of those films.

“On the more indie end of the scale, the poster for The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos just appears in like every fucking reference ever for an indie arthouse film,” says Sam. “On the more mainstream end, there will be a huge variety of posters of varying degrees of quality. Often, they just put them in because the film was successful and they weren’t really understanding what it is about that poster that works or doesn’t work.”