'Romeo + Juliet' Poster Analysis (Ella)

The purpose of this poster is to show the mixture between romance and violence of the families within the movie. The main image is a young couple kissing with the surrounding families looking like they are ready for a gun battle. Regardless of how violent everything else is around them, there is a shining heart at the top of the page showing how powerful their love is for one another. Background: The background is a swirl of strange colours, fading into each other with families and the couple in front of it all. The colours used give the poster a surreal feeling, the purples and greys make it look like a storm is coming at the edges of the pages where we can see the families ready with their weapons. And the orangey golds everywhere else make it seem like the heavens are opening for the young couple in the centre. 

There isn’t much realism to this poster, we can see that nearly all of it has been edited, the surreal colours and the families at the sides have been colour edited. Text Colour: The bright white is used for the title of the film, contrasting against the other colours. It makes it easy to read and makes it stand out, over the couple. The tagline is in black with a yellow outlining under the shining heart. The small print is in dark orange at the bottom, so it doesn’t stand out much and the date in the small print is white too. Tagline: The tagline, although small reads “my only love sprung by my only hate” this helps us make more sense of the battling families at the sides of the posters. This hatred has bought a young couple together despite everything else. It is a very strong, very romantic powerful tagline. Text Font: The font is very bold for everything, makes it easier to read the names of the actor/actress, the title and even the tagline too.

Target Audience: The target audience for a film like this, of course would be Shakespeare fans, and also lovers of romance, violence and drama. I think for its time that it was made this is a very well edited and good take on surrealism for a film poster. It has everything in it that we need to know. The love is strong between the couple and the families are clearly very violently at war with one another. The layout of the poster is well spread out. Even though there is a lot going on we can clearly see there is a young and in love couple at the centre of this battle between the violent and heavily armed families that stand either side of them. The metaphorical love heart about them and the heavenly light stays central to the poster. So the violence does not take centre stage over the love of the couple.