This Week in Movie Posters: July 27, 2026

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For many long-time Content Report-heads (and ex-FilmDrunkards), This Week In Posters has been a signature feature. I haven’t done one in a bit, largely because I have five or six jobs now, Top Chef stuff takes up a ton of time during Top Chef season (and is easily the biggest driver of paid subscriptions that I have), and in general, this tends to be the feature I put off doing whenever I get busy. Writing one or two lines of dopey jokes underneath movie posters just feels less “important” than a heartfelt personal essay, an attempt at a definitive movie review that I sweat over, some other dumb thing I probably thought was super important at the time that you probably didn’t read.

Obviously we’re not curing cancer around here, so I should probably stop being so precious. Long story short, I’m trying to bring This Week In Posters back on a more consistent basis. Probably it’s good for both of us to give the essays and reviews a break from time to time and simply let the mom jokes flow through me. (I look like Raiden from Mortal Kombat when I’m thinking up a really good one).

I get to make the dumbest jokes I can think up, and you get to hear about a few upcoming movies in the process. It’s a win-win! Bring back the internet being fun!

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James Wan produced Backrooms? I missed that. Anyway, I saw this trailer before The Odyssey the other week and it looked… uh… fine? The premise seems to go something like “what if a demon could possess your mom?”

At the very least, it looks to be a great vehicle for Jessica Chastain making weird faces. She doesn’t get enough credit for that talent.

I remember around the time that Zero Dark Thirty came out, they released a bunch of character posters and that whole scene where Jessica Chastain’s character flips out on Kyle Chandler right around the same time (the “mullah crackadullah” scene, for the real heads). She was really making some good faces in that, so I took a few screencaps of her angriest ones and made parodies of the character posters or something like that with a bunch of her freak-out faces. I don’t remember it with 100% accuracy, but rest assured it was really dumb.

(I think it was this scene, which is unfortunately not easily embeddable here).

Long story short, I got in SO MUCH TROUBLE for that. I don’t know if Chastain’s team was furious at the marketing team for releasing the scene out of context, if it was leaked through non-official channels, if someone just didn’t like the joke, or if someone saw the screencaps of goofy faces and hated it (possibly crapping on an FYC campaign in the process?) but I remember having at least five phone calls of people telling me everyone was mad and thinking I might get fired for a few days. I think I came very close. Ah, blogging.

Anyway, all of this is to say, it’s hard for me to see the trailer for Jessica Chastain in Other Mommy and not think, “Well well well, look who’s proud of her ability to make weird faces all of a sudden?”

Sidenote: Zero Dark Thirty was horseshit propaganda and I’m pretty sure (at least in that particular scene) the Kyle Chandler character was right all along.

That says “It Ends” and the design looks like… a digestive tract? Hey, is this a poster for “It Ends” or “Rear Ends,” am I right?

Friends on a late-night food run become trapped on an infinite highway with otherworldly terrors lurking beyond. Confined in their Jeep Cherokee, they must decide whether to accept their fate or attempt escape. [IMDB]

Hmm, I don’t see any thing about digestion or buttholes. Maybe the design is supposed to be a road? Looks like a road from the mouth to the ass, if you ask me.

American Doctor! …stay away from me.
American Doctor! …mama let me beee-hee
Don’t come-a chargin’ your copay fee
I don’t want a visit to bankrupt me…

Sorry, sometimes my brain goes into parody song mode and it has nothing to do with the actual movie. (It also only just now dawned on me that “American Woman” was written by Canadians. Probably older already people knew this?)

Actual synopsis:

When three American doctors-Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian-enter Gaza to save lives, they find themselves caught between medicine and politics, risking everything to expose the truth. [IMDB]

Sounds a lot more interesting than the “American _____” naming convention would suggest. Can we stop doing that now?

That being said, the bomb-flag design is pretty cool.

Angry Birds 3! Three feature-length movies from a video game where you shoot birds like a slingshot to try to kill some stationary pigs. Very impressive. I’ll probably see this with my kid, but I’m waiting for video.

iN tHiS HOusE, wE bELieVe iN aLTeRiNg tHE sIzE oF oUR fONts.

Okay, fine, maybe the font variation isn’t *that* weird. David Robert Mitchell plus dinosaurs? Count me in. It Follows is great, yes, but Under the Silver Lake is an underappreciated masterpiece, in my opinion. Certainly weird and not as user-friendly as, say, the Coen brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson (the other bards of SoCal), but Under the Silver Lake belongs to the pantheon of all-time great movies about LA.

Oh, you want to know what it’s actually *about*? Ugh, philistines:

The Platt family bands together to navigate their new surroundings after a cosmic event transports their suburban neighborhood to someplace unknown. [IMDB]

Are you happy now? I’m not, the poster was better.

You may have missed all the news stories about it this past week, but Lionsgate finally fixed Ryan Gosling’s “flat hand.”

Back in 2024, Gosling told The Wall Street Journal Magazine about a “moment” in the Oscar-winning hit that still haunts him years later: “We’re dancing, Emma and I, and I didn’t know this would become the poster for the movie. We were supposed to have our hands up, and I thought it would be cool to put my hand [more flat] even though everyone told me it wasn’t cool. I was sure it was cooler.”

“Now when I look at it, and I have to see it all the time, you know what would’ve been cooler… [the intended pose],” Gosling added. “It just killed the energy that way. I call it La La Hand.”

Here’s the old one:

I hate to say it about something so who cares, but I think Baby Goose is right. Flat hand was weird.

A biopic about the founder of Hershey from the studio that brought us The Sound of Freedom? Oh yes, we’re getting that. His name is “Milton Hershey,” by the way. I like the idea of a movie about a “young Milton Hershey who fucks,” but I doubt that would be the take from Angel Studios. And anyway, if that was what they were going for, they probably would’ve called it “Milton.” Oh well, at least they lined up the faces with the names.

Hershey’s chocolate sucks, by the way. Did it always, or is that a new development? Maybe the movie answers this.

Whoa, this movie poster is totally in my face! I’d love to tell you whether the faces and the names are lined up on this one but I have no idea who any of these people are. Which one is Cool Shirtman and which is Chris Del Chris? What of CHHHHAAAAAD?

“The hits keep on killing.”

Hmm, I can see what they were going for if I squint, but I think that play on words needed a little longer in the oven.

Chris Rock is directing a movie for A24?? This will be his first directorial effort since Top Five, in 2014. I didn’t see that one, but my chances of seeing this one are much greater as Chris Rock doesn’t seem to be one of the main actors in it.

I approve of the subtle side boob. More posters should show more parts of the boob, in my opinion.

“By NWR.”

You have to be really cool* to know that NWR refers to Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives). Who wants to bet me that the official synopsis includes the word “psychological?”

A hypnotic, unhinged thriller with an original story promising plenty of glamour, sex, and violence.

Damn, “hypnotic,” I was close.

*Borderline insufferable.

Shoot, this came out like a month ago and I never saw it. Any good? I’m guessing not. They made five Scary Movieses and then 13 years later the same guys made another one and they just called it “Scary Movie.” I don’t think that should be allowed.

“Before he was Scrooge, he was… Ebenezer.”

What was I just saying about the naming conventions for “young ____ who fucks” origin stories? Case in point.

This poster for Ebenezer has such palpable “fake movie in a 30 Rock episode” energy that you probably already saw people having a go at it on social media.

The crazy part? Ti West apparently directed this! That’s right, multiple-time Frotcast guest Ti West! Maybe it’s more tongue-in-cheek than it appears? No idea at this stage, but maybe he’ll come back and explain it. Maybe his life’s dream was always to make a movie about a young Ebenezer Scrooge who fucks, starring not-young Johnny Depp. This sounds so weird that I think I have to see it.

Here’s the teaser poster for Avengers: Doomsday. Nerds, this is your time to shine, because I have no idea if this tapestry is supposed to reference something that I’m supposed to be aware of. That character is played by Robert Downey Jr. though, I know that.

Gal Gadot is running! Even the font on her name looks like it’s running! And look, it’s a “Prime Original!” That means I’ll be “running” for the remote if this ever comes on by accident when I fall asleep watching something else.

Camp Rock 3, eh? Will I be lost if I never saw the first two? Which one is Cool Shirtman and which one is Chris Del Chris? I know I already used that joke, but it might be even more applicable here.

“From executive producers Joe Jonas, Nick Jonas, Kevin Jonas & Demi Lovato” is this week’s funniest tagline.

By the way, is that kid on the back right wearing a Zoot Suit with a camouflage t-shirt underneath? Mysteries abound.

And this brings us to this week’s best poster, this one for Mutiny, starring Jason Statham. If you didn’t get the reference, that uncanny quality you’re probably feeling is that this one is a riff on a famous poster for Die Hard:

“Die Hard on a ____” used to be the most common kind of movie math — Passenger 57 and Air Force One were Die Hard on a plane, Speed was Die Hard on a bus, Paul Blart was Die Hard in a mall, and so forth. They even sort of already did Die Hard on a boat, in Speed 2 and Under Siege. I guess technically Speed 2 was Die Hard on a cruise ship, Under Siege was Die Hard on a battleship, and this one is Die Hard on a container ship. They got all kinds of boats now, I always say. Whatever floats your boat.

Still, as we get collectively dumber, the parallels and puns have to get even clearer for anyone to pick up on them — as parodied perfectly in the Idiocracy time-lapse sequence where Fuddrucker’s eventually just becomes Buttfucker’s. I honestly can’t really fault the logic: “it’s Die Hard on a boat. Why don’t we just lead with that?”

I’m obviously hyped for this one, as I would be with any new Statham project. Only, it wasn’t Die Hard that I was picturing. I actually thought this should be a sequel to Gerard Butler’s Plane. Mutiny is a perfectly fine title, I suppose, but I think “Plane 2: Boat” better captures its essence.

You can’t put that many sparks on a poster that says “September 11th” on it! Too soon, man, too soon!

I kid. As we’ve discussed, sparks are a dad-movie poster staple. They convey “lots of action!”

Seriously though, I thought Liam Neeson was supposed to be retired from action movies. I thought he was going to marry Pamela Anderson and retire to Malta or something (I still want that for them).

And yet, this one looks distinctly Taken-y. In fact, IMDB tells me that the director’s name is “Guy Moshe,” which is the perfect name for a vaguely Eurotrash or possibly Israeli action movie director who directs a bad riff on Taken. (I’m not even going to look up where he’s from or if that’s the name he was born with, I want to be surprised.)

Let’s do some additional research…

Moshe wrote the script with Mark Bacci (Prisoner’s Daughter), from an original idea by Bazzel Baz (The Blacklist), a former CIA special operations group officer. Kerry Barden and Paul Schnee (Spotlight) are handling casting. [Deadline]

Excuse me, former CIA special operations group officer “Bazzel Baz?” That’s somehow an even more on-the-nose shitty action movie producer name than Guy Moshe. Plus, Paul Schnee! We are the Schnights who say Schnee! That was my favorite Monty Python bit.

This one apparently used to be called “Hotel Tehran.” Wonder why they changed it?