Drew Struzan’s 10 Best Movie Posters, From ‘Harry Potter’ to ‘Indiana Jones’ and ‘Star Wars’
If you were fortunate enough to be a child of the 1970s or ’80s, you experienced the golden age of Hollywood movie posters — a time before PhotoShop and AI, when key art (as it’s known in the industry) was truly an art form.
In those days, poster designs weren’t computer-generated. They were hand-painted by professionals whose interpretations of films unseen allowed imaginations to ignite from the moment the poster was first glimpsed. And once the films were seen, the best posters amplified the emotions felt while watching them, explaining why so many adorned bedroom walls.
I’m referring to legends like Bob Peak (“Apocalypse Now”), Roger Castel (“Jaws”), David Grove (“Something Wicked This Way Comes”), and my personal favorite, Drew Struzan, the go-to poster artist for George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Guillermo del Toro, responsible for the iconic images of the “Star Wars”, “Indiana Jones”, and even “Police Academy” franchises.
It’s no surprise that Spielberg and Lucas, known collectors of Norman Rockwell originals, appreciated Struzan’s talent. The Oregon-born, ArtCenter-trained painter — who signed his work with a lowercase “drew” — possessed the ability to elevate mediocre movies and immortalize the great ones.
I’ve been collecting movie posters almost as long as I’ve been a moviegoer. It’s a way to bring a piece of the cinematic experience home and live with it beyond the theater. Struzan is my ultimate artist (I once spent three months’ salary on an original, though most fetch six-figure sums), making his passing on Monday, at 78, a deeply sad day for the art form since his 2008 retirement.
In honor of his legacy, here is a guided tour of Struzan’s 10 best paintings, with typography and finishing touches removed.
Tarzan the Ape Man
This is my personal favorite Struzan painting, the one gracing my wall (a half-size comp, rendered in colored pencil, as I lack the $125,000 for the oil painting shown here). Fans might be surprised by the sheer number of designs Struzan explored for each finished poster, creating an infinite range of character poses. This masterpiece captures a scene absent from the movie, yet perfectly expresses the erotic chemistry between Miles O’Keefe and Bo Derek as the gentle ape man cradles Jane. In his personal work, Struzan often painted vivid portraits of jungle animals (especially wild cats). This project gave him the chance to place a majestic elephant at the center of the composition — though the focus remains on the gorgeous stars riding atop it. So why was this painting never used? Struzan told me that Derek specifically requested cheesecake painter Olivia De Berardinis for the poster, and as her husband John Derek directed the movie, she got her wish. This decision was a shame, as De Berardinis’ painting only features Jane (a Tarzan movie without Tarzan on the poster?!), whose face bears little resemblance to the actress.
Hook
The high prices Struzan’s paintings command is largely because they’re associated with the most beloved films of all time (it doesn’t hurt that Spielberg and Lucas eagerly pay top dollar for Star Wars and Indy originals). Yet, some of his finest work graced less successful films, which benefited from the imaginative boost of his depictions. “Hook” is an excellent example: Struzan’s painting can’t be blamed for the movie’s moderate box office returns, as the poster arrived a week after its release, but the poster embodies the playful spirit Spielberg intended in his tale of a grown-up Peter Pan (Robin Williams) returning to Neverland. The tattered map motif echoes Struzan’s treatment for “Cutthroat Island” (another flop with a stunning poster), while the expressions of Williams and Dustin Hoffman — as Captain Hook — vividly capture the characters’ inner lives. In his book, Struzan recalls visiting Hoffman’s home: “He answered the door in a bathrobe, eating a gallon of ice cream with a spoon.” The Method actor felt Struzan hadn’t captured his character, so the artist created another version.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Harrison Ford has reportedly stated that Struzan captured him better than any other artist (though the two didn’t meet until about 2013, during the making of the documentary “Drew: The Man Behind The Poster”). This doesn’t necessarily mean Struzan painted Ford most accurately. Instead, Struzan possessed a gift for imbuing a portrait with the actor’s personality — or, more accurately, the essence of the characters they played. Struzan painted Indiana Jones countless times over the years, for movie posters, pulp novels, video game covers, and even the theme park ride. He wasn’t the primary artist for “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “Temple of Doom” (though he created posters for both), but by the third movie, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” he became the franchise’s official artist, and it is arguably the best of them all. We see the character’s insouciance in the foreground, and his father’s disapproving gaze (Sean Connery saying, “We named the dog Indiana!”) over his shoulder. The scene is framed within ancient columns (reminiscent of Richard Amsel’s design for “Raiders”), creating an almost M.C. Escher-like illusion that contains Indy’s coat but not his hat. An action sequence charges off the page, front and center.
Back to the Future
Every artist infuses their work with themselves, but few do it as literally as Struzan. Because he often worked with only photos of the actors’ faces, he would ask his wife to photograph him “in character” whenever he needed a specific pose, then quickly develop the film for reference. (Artists worked so differently before the digital age!) Almost all hands in Struzan’s art belong to him, and for Robert Zemeckis’ time-travel classic, Struzan’s entire body, down to the sneakers, served as the model. This detail demonstrates how well he understood the film’s spirit, creating an iconic image — Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, checking his watch with one foot in the DeLorean — that is even more memorable than the parking-lot scene it evokes. Ironically, nearly every other comp Struzan produced for the poster featured giant clocks, but a less literal approach, focusing on the film’s emotional impact, proved more effective here. He placed other characters behind Fox for the sequels.
The Green Mile
Two qualities define Struzan’s work: First, the luminous inner glow that he imparts to each of his posters. Long before Thomas Kinkade figured out how to make his cottage paintings appear internally lit, Struzan was using his airbrush to make movie stars’ eyes sparkle and skin shimmer. Director Frank Darabont recognized this when he commissioned Struzan to design the cover art for a 10th-anniversary re-release of his beloved film, “The Shawshank Redemption,” featuring a nod to the original image of Tim Robbins standing with outstretched arms in the rain, rendered almost iridescent in Struzan’s style. But the best example might be the special edition DVD cover for Darabont’s other (lesser) Stephen King adaptation. Note how Tom Hanks seems to gleam, or the inner light radiating from Ving Rhames’ cupped palms. The painting itself is dark, but it practically glows with the same uplifting supernatural energy that makes the film so impactful. The artist brought a similar light to his treatment of “Pan’s Labyrinth” for Guillermo del Toro (another Struzan admirer), though the studio ultimately rejected it as the poster.
The Muppet Movie
Even more important among Struzan’s talents was his ability to make inanimate figures seem alive, crucial for handling the posters for Jim Henson’s Muppets. The characters were technically felt puppets manipulated on camera — a fact too obvious in most photographs of the “cast.” But in Struzan’s hands, they came to life. Look at his art for “The Muppet Movie,” where every character crammed into that old jalopy brims with personality, to the point that their voices seem audible. The image of Miss Piggy holding Kermit is not just funny (shouldn’t he be holding her?); it dispels the notion that they’re anything less than the spirited creatures kids believed them to be. It’s rare for a movie poster to elicit laughter, though Struzan managed it with the “Police Academy” movies. Henson so admired Struzan’s depiction of his creations that he asked the artist to design the posters for all their feature-length adventures (the one of the gang bursting through paper for “The Great Muppet Caper” is another classic).
The Goonies
To understand the workflow of a movie poster artist in the 1980s, consider Struzan’s comps for “The Goonies.” The finished poster shows the treasure-hunting gang hanging from a stalactite, but before settling on the final arrangement (lower right, with Josh Brolin at the top and Martha Coolidge almost obscured in the distance), he mocked up several other options. This trait defines commercial artists like Struzan, distinguishing them from blue-chip artists creating for galleries and collectors: Struzan worked on commission, revising and refining based on the client’s requests. He was a trained painter, working on gessoed boards that added a dramatic three-dimensional quality to his final passes, yet studio marketing departments dictated the direction, resulting in many compromises in his compositions. While some might see this as a weakness, I consider it a strength: He possessed immense technical skill and the discipline to overhaul designs dozens of times if needed. What’s revealing about his “Goonies” process is that virtually any of these options could have worked.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Much changed about the “Harry Potter” franchise after the first film: The films grew darker, the children aged, and the magic became increasingly digital (as did the posters promoting them). I credit two artists with giving J.K. Rowling’s rich world its on-screen personality: First, composer John Williams, whose theme imbued Chris Columbus’ original film with the perfect sense of enchantment. But Struzan comes a close second with this beautiful one-sheet. Years later, we forget how challenging the assignment was: Every child who’d read the book had imagined Harry, Hermione, and the other characters, and the poster needed to convince audiences that this was the right cast. Looking back, it’s remarkable (and unprecedented) that nearly the entire cast remained with the franchise to the end (except Richard Harris as Dumbledore). It’s a shame Struzan couldn’t have done the same, saving us from the unimaginative posters that followed.
Big Trouble in Little China
Struzan faced an impossible task with “The Thing,” asked to design a poster without knowing what the extraterrestrial entity would look like, so he painted a glowing spacesuit reminiscent of Klaatu from “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Many consider it his most iconic poster, although his painting for a later John Carpenter movie is actually a superior work of art. Struzan would admit that the composition is essentially a mishmash of too many elements, yet this is precisely why it works. “Big Trouble in Little China” is a wild film, and Struzan’s poster communicates its qualities: humor, romance, martial arts, a monster truck, supernatural intrigue, and self-aware silliness — indicated by the broken CB radio cord in Kurt Russell’s hand. As previously mentioned, that is not Russell’s hand, but rather Struzan’s, who served as his own model, striking the pose so often associated with the character.
Star Wars: Special Edition Trilogy
Struzan didn’t create the poster for the original “Star Wars” (that was Tom Jung, while Greg and Tim Hildebrandt created the Boris Vallejo-style poster of Luke raising his lightsaber with Leia), but he became the artist most associated with the franchise. In 1997, when George Lucas re-released the original trilogy, he commissioned Struzan — who had designed the most collectible of all “Star Wars” posters, the red and black teaser for a pre-title-change “The Revenge of the Jedi” featuring Darth Vader in silhouette — to paint a new set of posters. Struzan designed them as a triptych, able to be displayed side-by-side to form a single horizontal panel. Much darker than his usual work, the art marked a departure from Struzan’s 80s style and came to define the prequel trilogy (his “Phantom Menace” poster depicted the movie audiences hoped it would be, showcasing Darth Maul’s facial markings and minimizing Jar Jar Binks). Unlike most posters, Struzan’s re-release set wasn’t designed to lure audiences to theaters, but to provide fans with an image capturing their love for the original films.
প্রকাশিত: 2025-10-15 19:50:00
উৎস: variety.com
