Colours in movie posters since 1914
Edit: Buy the movie poster hues (1914-2012) poster
A couple of weeks ago, I was having brunch with Kim-Mai Cutler -- we were discussing the new startup I’m building in the enterprise space (if you're a ui/ux person or awesome engineer looking for something fun to do, drop me a line!) -- and I mentioned how I felt that most movie posters these days were very blue and dark. She didn’t fully believe me and challenged me to prove it. I looked around, and found some people had done this with a few posters over the last few years, but I became curious about the longer-term trends and what they would show. So, as any engineer would do, I wrote some code! (The code is open source and lives on github: image analysis.)
Edit: this post is up on Flowing Data, an awesome data visualization blog, YC Hacker news!, and Gizmodo. I will be doing a follow-on post with much better analysis and much more data. Follow @vijayp on twitter and stay tuned!
Visualizations:
The number of posters I was able to get varied based on the year:
I first made a unified view of colour trends in movie posters since 1914. Ignoring black and white colours, I generated a horizontal strip of hues in HSL. The width of each hue represents the amount of that hue across all images for that year, and the saturation and lighting were the weighted average for all matching pixels. Since HSL has a fixed order, comparisons can be made between years visually. (You can buy the movie poster hues poster here.) Click on the image below for a more detailed view:
Next, I made a similar unified view of generic colour trends in movie posters since 1914, but here lightness and saturation are both ignored. This makes the distribution of hues much more clear, but hides the average “darkness” of the photos.
Finally, I have created a pie chart representing the colour distribution of a specific year’s movie posters. (This should probably be animated and a line graph, more on that in the future work section)
Rationale:
First off, it is true that movie posters are much more blue, and much less orange than they used to be. QED 
This page also talks about the blue/orange colours in movies.
This does appears to be a steady trend since 1915. Could this be related to evolution in the physical process of poster printing; what's the effect of the economics and difficulty of producing posters over time? I also wonder whether moviemakers have become better at figuring out the “optimal” colour distribution of posters over time, and whether we’re asymptotically approaching some quiescent distribution.
I was a bit concerned that some of this might be due to bias in the data: some movies would be over-represented in the intra-year average (remember that some movies have multiple posters and I normalize over posters, not movies). I think this is not actually a huge issue because it’s reasonable to assume that a movie’s marketing budget is roughly proportional to the number of posters that it has produced for itself. This means that the skew, if any, would be similar to the perceived average.
I presented these preliminary data to some friends of mine who are more steeped in the world of graphics and arts. Cheryle Cranbourne, (she used to be a graphics designer and has just finished a Masters in interior architecture at RISD) had a number of good thoughts:
[Edit: I had misquoted this earlier] The movies whose posters I analysed "cover a good range of genres. Perhaps the colors say less about how movie posters' colors as a whole and color trends, than they do about how genres of movies have evolved. For example, there are more action/thriller/sci-fi [films] than there were 50-70 years ago, which might have something to do with the increase in darker, more 'masculine' shades.”
This is backed up a bit by data from under consideration’s look at movie posters. They didn’t go back very far, but there did seem to be a reasonable correlation between movie age rating and palette.
She also pointed out that earlier posters were all illustrated/ hand painted, with fewer colors and less variation in tone. Perhaps the fact that white and black have become more prevalent is due to the change from illustration to photography. Painted skin might also over-represent orange and under-represent other hues that happen in real life.
Methodology:
I downloaded ~ 35k thumbnailed-size images (yay wget -- “The Social Network” inspired me to not use curl) from a site that has a lot of movie posters online. I then grouped the movie posters by the year in which the movie they promoted was released. For each year, I counted the total number of pixels for each colour in the year. After normalizing and converting to HSL coordinates, I generated the above visualizations.
Inspirations:
I was inspired by Tyler Neylon’s great work on colour visualizations. I ended up writing my own code to do these image analysis visualizations, but I will try to integrate it with his work.
Future work:
There’s a bunch of stuff I still have to / want to do, but since I’m working on my startup, I don’t really have much time to focus on it right now. Here’s a long list of stuff:
- Follow up on all the open questions about the reasons for this change.
- Use other metadata (not just year) for movies to search for patterns. A simple machine learning algorithm should suffice if I throw all the attributes in at once. This should be able to highlight whether genre is important, and what other factors are crucial
- “main colour” analysis. I should run some kind of clustering (as Tyler does in his code). His code uses a handwritten (?) k-means clustering algorithm, which is a bit slow when faced with thousands of pictures worth of data. There are some faster albeit slightly less accurate versions that I could use.
- I need to move the pie charts to use gcharts js api, so they’re interactive
- I should probably make nicer/fancier js onhover stuff
- I should look at Bollywood and other sources to see whether this holds across countries.
- My visualizations and javascript aren't so good. I have to learn how to do this stuff better!
June 11th, 2012 - 12:18
Interesting article.. I don’t mind a UX and info architecture challenge. Feel free to drop me a line.
June 13th, 2012 - 16:49
Beautiful visualizations. Any seasonal changes?
June 13th, 2012 - 18:00
I’m interested in finding out more about that gap in 1924. What is this a result of?
June 14th, 2012 - 10:00
Movie posters from where and when and how many of the same film? I’ve collected many different posters for the same film, some films have hundreds, most at least 3 (an A, B, and other model). Could you research and expand the sized of the collection of your sources? Polish movie posters in particular are reknowned and treasured for their artistry, often designed by hand.
Ron
June 14th, 2012 - 11:05
I thought it was interesting you suggested moviemakers are finding an “optimal” color distribution. I work for a DVD distributor and our data has suggested that generally DVDs with blue cover art tend to sell better than identical product with red-orange cover art. It could be the same for movie posters.
June 15th, 2012 - 08:40
Where did the posters come from? The visualization is very pretty, but it’s not not particularly interesting unless we know what the data source was.
June 15th, 2012 - 10:16
I got them from movieposterdb. It’s pretty comprehensive, but I didn’t crawl the site completely. Since this post garnered a lot of attention, I am doing it again in a more thorough way and will do a better analysis, hopefully this weekend. Stay tuned!
June 17th, 2012 - 18:54
Great blog; extremely interesting analysis.
June 18th, 2012 - 07:06
Haven’t seen “The Social Network” – what did it have to say about curl?
June 18th, 2012 - 09:27
Interesting analysis .. are we moving towards shiny, sleek, metallic tones and darker moods that we see around that somehow inspire those colors we appreciate in those posters..just a thought..waiting up for your detailed analysis…
June 18th, 2012 - 09:33
I would think analysis of the percentage of whitespace on posters would be interesting, too – my perception is that classic movie posters used to be much whiter, with modern posters tending to use full-colour print across the entire surface.
June 18th, 2012 - 12:32
Great Work man!
But its kinda strange how dominate red is.
June 18th, 2012 - 17:17
I love how the chart looks.
I wonder if there is any preference trend in album covers?
June 18th, 2012 - 17:22
This is so cool. Awesome work. Neat project.
June 18th, 2012 - 18:17
Any statistical analyses done on the data? Were there significant results?
June 18th, 2012 - 18:23
Large obvious spike of blue in 1977 adds to the factor of Star Wars’ popularity.
And what’s with the big black line in 1924?
June 18th, 2012 - 18:53
You can check IMPAWARDS.com to get many more posters for each year. For example, here you have of 1924
http://www.impawards.com/1924/alpha1.html
June 19th, 2012 - 01:52
Came here from r/dataisbeautiful. Excellent idea, and a lovely implementation. It might be cool to see the histogram along the vertical axis of the number of movies considered within each year. I think movies are such an awesome source of “Everyday Data” to play with…
June 19th, 2012 - 08:12
This doesn’t take into account color fading.
While I would suspect that the reds might fade faster than the blues in print, and blues faster in negative images, I don’t see anything in your process to account for the fading of the posters over time. I think when you take into account fading, well this project gets overly complex and finding real results requires a deeper analysis of each poster, how it was produced and how it was persevered.
For accurate information, you might be better off just going to the printing companies and figuring out how much of each color paint they bought and when.
That being said you have done a fantastic job of presentation here, Nice work, and this is a very thought provoking idea.
June 19th, 2012 - 12:47
It looks to me as though it’s greens yellows and pinks that are getting squeezed. I would suggest that red and blue colours are increasingly being played off against each other for sharp contrast in a red oni/blue oni style.
June 19th, 2012 - 14:58
I wonder if this has anything to do with the techniques of color reproduction on the machines that print the posters. The capabilites of rendering and color accuracy/price evolved and changed over time. For what i know greens/blues are more difficult to reproduce and don’t age so well as red’s/yellows. Maybe that whas a reason why movie posters were made with more warmer colors too. Or maybe not
June 19th, 2012 - 15:00
I just noticed now that you mentioned this as an hypoteses on your analysis. Somehow i didn’t noticed that paragraph. Interesting study.
June 19th, 2012 - 16:46
How do you take into account these factors:
1. Aging of movie posters. You would not be able to get imagery of older posters “as they were” when printed / created.
2. Printing techniques, as well as production, has changed over time.
3. Presentation on different media. Movie posters are not just created for “posters” these days. They are used in advertising on TV, the Internet and such as well.
I actually find the the increase, and then falloff, of magenta a lot more interesting. Also, the lack of screen throughout, especially as it is the color that we see best.
It is also interesting that 77, 80, 86 and 95 also have the smoothest gradients.
A correlation between the ‘types’ of films would also be interesting. Action vs drama etc. Could this explain things?
June 20th, 2012 - 06:24
I’d be more interesting to go into some more fine-toothed datasets: sort by studio, or academy award winners, or box office hits or flops, or by genre or sub-genre, or by nationality such as Hollywood vs Bollywood, or even before and after specific revolutionary films such as Sci-fi before-and-after Star Wars or CG animated movies before-and-after Toy Story.
Much hay could be made of this.
June 20th, 2012 - 08:45
I fixed the 1924 bug, finally
June 21st, 2012 - 20:03
Vijay, are you able to split each strip into pie charts of the seven pure spectral colors? I have a time-series modelling technique that might shed some light (pardon the pun) on the trends in the economics of the industry.
June 25th, 2012 - 14:32
This is very nice and interesting. A “fact” that I (and Im sure many others) have noticed about movie posters and/or covers (dvd, vhs, etc), is that if it has a white background and with not much else going on, it will be a “chick flick” (romantic comedy usually). It seems to me to be astoundingly consistent, although I havent done any actual scientific research to prove it and Im sure there must exist exceptions. Im not sure whether to find it annoying, or to be thankful for the heads up so I can stear well clear of those movies.
Another obvious observation is that posters and covers for children’s movies will often have a lot of bright primary colours.
June 27th, 2012 - 08:26
Great poster and analysis. Actually just a great little project. I find 1919 and 1920 interesting for their seemingly excessive spikes of blue (blue greens, etc) It makes me want to pull the list of films from that period to see what was going on. Just a casual review so far at IMDB, but http://www.imdb.com/year/1919/ and http://www.imdb.com/year/1920/ do seem to have the blue-orange/black-orange dynamic going on.
July 14th, 2012 - 00:39
Really cool to see these trends over time! I also wonder how much pricing of different inks played a role especially in early 1900s. The very end of this article: http://ezinearticles.com/?Early-Indigo-Dyeing-and-Printing-Methods&id=1519705 suggests that synthetic indigo didn’t become commercially viable until the 1920s, which is the first year you see a larger amount of blue in these posters.
Very interesting, thanks for putting all this together!
July 14th, 2012 - 16:37
Here’s a thought. In the last few years, with the global crisis and all, I noticed a “design” trend. It’s more of a psychological factor rather than an aesthetic one. Colors are pretty important in psychology and you all probably know that designers chose to use certain colors for each of their clients depending on their target audience, etc.
Now, if you look back a hundred years, we’ve went through some rough times and evolved to what we are now. Usually, the colors used during the decades represent a state of mind which defines those times. And you can look back to the jazz-era, the rock-and-roll era, the hippie era, the hard rock era, the pop era, you get the point. They’re pretty much interconnected, and the best example is music plus fashion trends. Look on how they evolved and compare it to your charts and you’ll see it’s pretty much similar.
Now, your charts are a pretty good definition of how optimistic people were during those specific decades. Believe it or not, the ’30s were probably the most optimistic, right after the Great Depression. Then the ’40, because winning the war meant that a new bright future will arise, then the ’50s with its futurism (we now call it retrofuturism, lol.)
Then, ’60s were kind of a disappointment, because the future imagined in the ’50s didn’t really happen (google for “American Pie explained”.) You should also check out the ’70s and ’78 and ’79, how things evolved. Correlate this with the hippie movement and all, then the Woodstock, etc. Then look at the ’80s and the ’90s, when evolution meant more corporate jobs and more stress.
Basically, where there’s lots of orange and yellow, you have optimist years. Where there’s lots of stress, people start to lack optimism and you can see the disappointment in the colors they use. The best example is in the recent few years, just look at your chart and check out the amount of dark colours.
It’s actually fun to try to observe how stuff evolves. My conclusion is that people need optimism – and a simple demonstration is the fashion industry in the last two or three years, which basically released collections inspired from the ’50s fashion all the way to the ’90s in such a short time.
Anyway, it’s just a theory.
July 23rd, 2012 - 22:49
My explaination is that red-orange-yellow are earthly colors, while green-blue-violet are spacey colors. I see it as the evolution toward science-fiction and futuristic movies. Therefore, contrary to the previous post, I’d say that the bluer, the more optimistic/futurist the mood. Notice for example the spikes in blue in 1919/1920 (after the WWI, the mood certainly improved), or in 1967 (Apollo 1) or 1976 (Shuttle).
July 25th, 2012 - 17:18
Wondering if there’s more greys/browns/drab tones during economic/cultural downturn…