This movie poster for Richard Linklater’s 2013 film Before Midnight immediately reveals a divergence from the former methods of advertising the films of the trilogy that were made apparent through the posters for Before Sunrise and Before Midnight. For this film, the entire surface of the poster contains an image of Jesse and Céline located somewhere within the setting of Greece. While previous posters honed in specifically on the two characters, this image is pulled back and reveals a more obvious concern with both space and character recognition. The questions presented on the 1995 and 2004 movie posters have not translated across time to appear here; instead, a statement of praise from a critic writing for Rolling Stone has been displayed across the top of the composition. Hawke and Delpy’s names have been made to take up even less space but continue the formatting from the 2004 poster with their placement right above the film’s title. In small letters in the lower righthand corner, the statement denoting this to be “A Richard Linklater Film” has returned after an absence from the poster for Before Sunset.
I included the official movie poster for the final iteration of the trilogy’s reintroductions to Jesse and Céline as a means to illustrate how the ideas presented in the first two movie posters either translated or were lost to the more contemporary moment of the 2010s. By looking at the three movie posters in conjunction, I noticed that, over time, the way a poster had been constructed for each of these films had begun to align more closely with the appearance of the kinds of movie posters being released for an audience of today’s cinema.