4 Easter Eggs In Superhero Movie Posters You Totally Missed
It seems like pretty much all superhero movie posters look identical. We'll see one that has Superman on it, realize that a new Superman movie is coming out soon and will no doubt be a huge disappointment, and then we go on with our day. But you should stop and take a closer look every now and then, because some seemingly normal posters are hiding some rather clever details. Look at how ...
A Key Character Is Hiding In The Corner Of The Captain Marvel Poster
The Captain Marvel poster is so bland that it might as well be called Superhero Movie: The Movie.
But let's zoom and enhance that bottom-left section:
To lay readers that may look like a cat butt, but the comic book experts we keep in the garage inform us that it's actually a Flerken butt. A Flerken is a space cat that lays eggs and can do magic, because comic books are dumb. Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, aka the star of this movie, owns one named Chewie under the assumption that it's a normal pet cat, only to discover otherwise as they go on adventures together.
So Chewie will presumably be in the movie, although this could mean anything from a quick cameo to the alien teleporting around and devouring creatures with its magical interdimensional maw. It will definitely mean countless Chewie toys flooding stores near you.
The Black Panther Poster References An Actual Black Panther
At a glance, this Black Panther poster looks like a generic "Hey, here's our hero" image, with a touch of Afrofuturism thrown in.
But astute observers, including Curbed's Diana Budds, caught that the style and pose mimicked this 1968 photo of Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party.
T'Challa wasn't exactly the first guy to riff on the image, as everyone from Beyonce to John Waters has posed in a peacock chair. And while this chair is all future-y, the way it frames the Avenger still has the same enveloping peacock vibe. But why is that relevant, beyond the obvious fact that it looks cool?
Well, to give you a crash course in furniture politics, the chair has Asian origins, and it became popular in America because of its vibes of exotic royalty. It's easy to imagine sitting in that chair and being fanned and hand-fed fruit by nubile women, especially if you're the sort of person whose understanding of other cultures began and ended by skimming National Geographic nudes. Over the decades, the style was used in prop photography, became part of the Tiki craze (ask your grandparents), and eventually became a countercultural symbol among people whose interior decorating ethos matched that of Jeff Lebowski.
So the Black Panthers started using the chair too. Like any good political organization, they knew that visual representation was half the battle. Kitschy Americana was repurposed to portray black power with African overtones, and the chair quickly became synonymous with the Panthers. (Presumably, T'Challa's chair can fly and has an antimatter cannon for dueling with Shuma Gorath the Many-Angled One, but that's neither here nor there.)
Related: 6 Easter Eggs In Movie Posters (You Never Knew Were There)
The Dark Knight Poster Had A Hidden Message
Remember when we were all really into The Dark Knight, to the point where every Halloween party featured a dozen Jokers? That obsession was driven partly by the Joker-heavy advertising campaign, which gave us all the catchphrase that we would grow so very, very tired of seeing on countless MySpace pages and MSN Messenger profiles.
But wait, what's that little red line under "Summer 2008"?
If you paid attention to your theater's "coming soon" posters instead of dashing by them on your way to get your fourth popcorn refill, you'd know that those were letters turned on their sides. Spin them around and you got the phrase "A Taste For The Theatrical." In addition to confirming that The Dark Knight was a movie and not an unusually elaborate ballet, those words could be turned into a URL that took you to a Gotham Times ad teasing the release of a new trailer. And when you came back at the appropriate time, you could be among the first in the world to watch the latest trailer and then never shut the fuck up about it.
Related: 7 Insane Easter Eggs Hidden In Movies And TV Shows
The Infinity War IMAX Poster Trolled Fans Hard
The poster for Infinity War was ... well, let's just call it busy.
Fans, as fans do, immediately rushed to search for Easter eggs. In a desire to see the absent Ant-Man make an appearance, they spotted, or claimed to have spotted, several microscopic appearances, although they were all soon demonstrated to be obvious fakes or cases of pareidolia. (Weirdly, no one claimed to have spotted a Hawkeye Easter egg.) But fans were fueled to spot something by an announcement from IMAX themselves that indeed, the Infinity War poster contained Easter Eggs. Four of them, to be precise. Holy shit, what secrets could be revealed?
Oh, it was just four instances of the word "IMAX" as scrawled by a child. So the next time you're admiring the epic sprawl of this poster, keep in mind that it also doubled as a weird marketing move that didn't even feature a single Ant-Man.
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