The 33 most iconic movie posters

Sometimes you don’t even need to see the trailer to know what a movie is all about. Sometimes, all you need is to just look at the poster.

With its roots in vaudeville and carnival advertising, the history of movie posters dates to roughly 1890. That’s when Jules Cheret’s French-language short film, Projections Aristiques, advertised itself with a black-and-white illustration of a young girl holding up the sign telling observers when and where to see the movie. (This was, of course, long before the days of mass distribution of movies.)

A few years later in 1895, the poster for the silent film L’Arroseur Arrose (in English, The Waterer Watered) was the first to preview the contents of the movie itself, whereas posters before it simply promoted the technological novelty or quality of the recordings. L’Arroseur Arrose was the first to actually tease the story, about a gardener in an amusing mishap. From there, the rest is a long, drawn-out (get it?) history.

Throughout the 20th century, the meteoric rise of Hollywood studios saw marketing departments hire illustrators from magazines and paperback novels to draw up the posters of theatrical releases. In the 21st century, dedicated artists now use an array of digital tools to create posters that are sometimes just as memorable as hand-drawn works of art. To celebrate the ongoing history of movie posters, here are some of the most iconic movie posters of all time.