Ranking the Posters of the 1998 Summer Movies
Does Size Matter?
Despite some doomsaying, a current writers’ strike with an actors’ one on the horizon, full distraction from the twin national pastimes of streaming and vomiting terrible opinions in comment sections, and a lack of content following the pandemic, movie theaters are BACK, baby! If by “back” we mean consolidated into terrible multiplexes with absurd ticket prices that can’t mask the abysmal attendance for The Flash. But people still go to the movies, especially if the movies are any good!
And boy are the movies basically the same level of quality on average as they used to be. It’s selection bias; you’re more likely to remember a Goodfellas than a Death Warrant, released the same week in 1990. The bad movies start to fall away, and they fall away faster when they can be forgiven at a lower ticket price. The average ticket to a movie in America today costs $10.53, which is a price that screams “just buy the 4K in six months, or maybe even stream it when you’re bored in two years”. Twenty-five years ago, when I was in my prime early-high-school pop-culture-obsessed window, tickets were $4.69, and at that price (which usually involved the dollar theater down the way) basically any movie was up for grabs. The sequel to a horror movie I hadn’t seen? Sure; they always recapped the good bits at the top anyway. A weird art movie about magazine editors and lesbians? Hey, the poster couldn’t possibly be lying.
The poster always lied, though. And when we were trying to figure out what to see in the summer of 1998 half the time we took a cursory glance at the posters outside the theater and decided on that basis alone. When we did plan ahead we were suckered in by increasingly-oppressive advertising campaigns that launched sometime during the Carter Administration. (I’d like to apologize to my mother, who barely ever went to the movies, for having to sit through some of Hollywood’s greatest abominations with me in this summer.) For some movies we had no choice. They were an event. We weren’t gonna miss an event.
So here are the posters for the movies I saw that summer, ranked from worst to first, demonstrating that at nearly-fourteen your tastes are all scrambled and it’s a crapshoot as to whether you’ll see anything good. First up is…
DEAD LAST:
Oh boy. Whee. My best friend and I went to go see this on his birthday, and I’m not sure what the impetus was for choosing this one over Can’t Hardly Wait or Dirty Work or Bulworth. Harrison Ford on an adventure? Lord knows I was already one of America’s preeminent Indiana-Jones-ologists. To be honest it was probably the phrase “An Ivan Reitman Film” over the title. How could the man behind Ghostbusters steer us wrong in the summer?
Believe it or not, this poster is full of more joy and frivolity than the film proper. Six Days, Seven Nights is an impossibly predictable slog that seemed to feature negative jokes and Harrison Ford at his least committed. I should have been warned off by the poster, with the paper-craft backdrop of Kauai and the mirthless mugging of the two leads. I can’t tell this is a comedy. I can barely tell this is a movie.
SLIGHTLY LESS TERRIBLE:
I apparently give infinite chances to comedy people I like. This summer would also include Wrongfully Accused, the most tolerable of Leslie Nielsen’s late-career zero-effort parodies. I loved The Naked Gun, I loved Airplane!, this has to be just as—
Lemme stop you right there. Jane Austen’s Mafia! is as scattered and try hard as the title. There are occasionally-fun little gags—a casino game called “You Absolutely Cannot Win”, Jay Mohr being ejected from a car-bombing into a slam-dunk contest—but they’re rare in a movie that thinks starting with a Macarena joke and ending with a Barney reference denoted the height of comedy in 1998. You can see that at work right here on the poster. Look, a reference to the original Godfather poster! Twenty-six years after the fact! That’s like making a Face/Off reference today. What a disaster of an ending to Lloyd Bridges’ career.
APPARENTLY COMEDIES HAD TERRIBLE POSTERS THIS YEAR, I DUNNO:
I would have walked uphill in a snowstorm to see Chris Farley’s last movie, and thankfully I only had to walk a block off Times Square in June heat. Which is nice, because this movie is not worth any sort of quest. Almost Heroes is a movie one can see going through the same neutering and reshaping that Christopher Guest parodied in his first film The Big Picture, going from merciless send-up of Ken Burns to whatever the hell that taxidermy dentist scene was. Christopher Guest was the main reason I wanted to see Almost Heroes, because as much as I loved Chris Farley I was on a Waiting for Guffman kick and desperately wanted more.
Time has not been kind to this movie; as far as I can tell there is no cult about it, not even as the curio of being Chris Farley’s final performance. I like it a lot more than most people, which means I can point to maybe three jokes that made me laugh. Even the poster seems to understand there’s nothing to sell but the leads, and here we’re seeing the least committed Matthew Perry was on a film poster, which is saying a lot.
SURPRISINGLY BORING FOR WHAT IT IS:
I don’t have to tell you anything about There’s Something About Mary, which still lives in its own category of raunch a quarter-century later. If it wasn’t so damn well made it wouldn’t continue to linger, but it’s really a fantastic comedy. I have this theory that hiring Chris Elliott automatically makes your film or television project better, that everything from The Abyss to Schitt’s Creek is a winner because he brings some marshall quality to the proceedings, but I can’t prove it. This one definitely wasn’t Brett Favre’s fault, anyway.
What doesn’t work here is the poster, at least not knowing what we know now. I was drawn in by the slapstick TV commercials, Matt Dillon’s teeth and Lee Evans on crutches and the catapulted dog all set to “History Repeating”. Likely fearing confusion if any of the gross-out gags of the film made it to the poster, we just get the hint of “If you liked these movies…” Later iterations of print ads would add back in the “hair gel”, but by that point you were getting foreign markets and us 90s teens seeing it again and again.
SOMETHING ABOUT DISNEY IN 2023, SOMETHING SOMETHING CLASSICS:
Even back then I was aware that it was total horsehockey that B.D. Wong’s singing voice was dubbed by Donny Osmond of all people. B.D. Wong has a Tony, and Donny Osmond has a replaced as the host of Miss America by Tony Danza. What makes it even worse is that “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” is an absolute classic. What could have been.
But what was is that Mulan is a tremendous movie, and it’s the first on this list where the quality of the film matches up with the quality of the poster. Disney was about a year and a half away from just farting out movies with terrible ad campaigns regardless of quality, truly not giving a care through the last few years of the Eisner era. Mulan and Tarzan are really the last of the spectacles that Disney managed to promote like this, but they both are truly worthy of the hype. I’d absolutely want an embossed version of this one-sheet hanging up on my wall.
HEY, HOW DO WE PROMOTE ZORRO?:
That is definitely Zorro. Next!
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE VISIT YOUR LOCAL MOVIE THEATER:
Chris Carter knows the least of anybody about what makes The X-Files so good. This poster, though? Yeah we just wanted any version of this to hang up in our rooms. If you were a Phile this was pretty much all you were looking at through the end of June. There were zero clues as to the content of the film here, but HI MULDER AND SCULLY WE LOVE YOU—
Fight the Future is thankfully more than just an extended episode, although I’m never called to revisit it much. I’ll never get over watching it on opening night and the collective “oh come ON!!!” from the crowd as the kiss is interrupted by a killer alien bee. That’s the sort of fan reaction that you can only get in the theater.
THE 1998 “IT’S GREMLINS BUT NO CHANGES” AWARD:
Continuing the 1998 list of comic actors who I really liked and who died before their last movie could be released: Phil Hartman. That one really hurt. It was a stupid unnecessary death, both of him and his wife, and now that we know who’s responsible it’s even worse. I always wonder what he would be making right now.
The movie itself is…you know, it’s fine. It’s pretty good. It’s got some fun bits to it. Joe Dante is just making the two Gremlins movies again trying to get a hit out of it. The cast is crazy stacked with anyone and everyone weird enough to be in a Joe Dante movie. (I’m sorry, Ann Magnuson plays the mom? That’s amazing.) Kid from Everwood has none of Zach Galligan’s charisma and the human stakes feel way less than in Gremlins. I’m sure some studio exec told Dante to tone down the violence, as if we all don’t love the scene in Gremlins where the evil old lady gets murdered on her stair-lift.
Audiences went into Small Soldiers thinking the G.I. Joes were the good guys only to get a satire about how we sell war to kids at a young age. Didn’t Joe Dante hear that America is the forever good guys now in the 90s? No wonder this flopped.
YEAH WOO ‘MERICA EXPLOSIONS!!!:
Okay everyone who’s ever been in a Coen Bros. or Wes Anderson movie: we need you to save the world in the stupidest way possible.
We made two of these asteroids get blowed up movies in the summer of 1998. Who says America isn’t the greatest country on Earth? The teaser image here for Armageddon is the obvious winner of the marketing campaigns. Deep Impact, for want of something interesting happening in their film, went straight for an image from the super-depressing ending, thus giving you zero reason to go to it. (I didn’t enjoy seeing my hometown obliterated before real-life stuff happened and I like it less now.) Both movies really seemed to play up the idea that only some people died, and it was people in big cities far away that you’ve never been to, Mr. and Mrs. Middle America. The people you care about will be safe because the United States NASA used our nuclear weapons!
Both of these movies are garbage but at least Armageddon could be entertainingly so. This is the most “sorry, Mom” I get about these movies, because I can’t believe she drove us three towns over in the fog to see this junk. Why Armageddon and not Deep Impact? Well, like that Sarah Marshall tweet about weird thirteen-year-olds who listen to Django Reinhardt—and I do love me some Django—I was a thirteen-year-old who would see anything involving Steve Buscemi. After Desperado he was the biggest star in the world for me, and no I cannot explain that.
HIS TAIL IS AS LONG AS THIS SUBSTACK:
Aw yeah, the Godzilla marketing campaign. We never saw ‘Zilla himself, only the measurements of how big the atomic lizard ostensibly was. There’s no way to explain properly the utter hype that was created for this movie. If it had been even a little okay it would have been the biggest movie ever made.
Godzilla (1998), of course, was atrocious. I’ve got a separate post for that coming up, but I’m sure it was one of the major events that set me up for all of life’s disappointments.
THE BEST ONE BY A MILE:
I had this one up on my wall all through high school. There were too many nights where I woke up stressed out at three in the morning looking at somebody else staring back at me only to remember it was Jim Carrey.
There’s no better thematic statement of purpose for The Truman Show than this image. It’s the only poster on this list that literally draws you in, that makes you pay even closer attention the more you see it. Once you’ve seen the film it becomes a fantastic moment of dissection as you look for your favorite scenes and try to decipher how and why of it all. The second poster is nearly as good as it seems to predict and prophesize the 21st Century, but this is the one that first caught my attention. The Truman Show was the best film of 1998 the moment it was released, and it’s only gotten better since then. It’s the sort of film that says good morning and—in case it doesn’t see you—good afternoon, good evening, and good night to the way we live now. What felt like fantasy is now just prologue. It’s only fitting that it had the best ad campaign.