The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Poster

The first documented movie poster (also called a film poster) was created in the 1890’s. These early renditions were made for both short films and theater productions. They were hung outside of halls and movie theaters and consisted of placards listing the program of films that were being shown. Eventually, each film poster showcased a movie company but would not include the title of the film. Gradually, the style of the posters evolved and the title of the film was featured. They also began to add illustrations of a single scene from the movie or a selection of images from several scenes overlaid on each other.

Yet another major change was in store when the movie studios recognized that movie goers cared as much about the movie stars acting in the movies as they did about the movie itself. So the movie stars themselves were added to the movie posters along side the title and Movie Company.

With over 100 million people flocking to see movies in the late 1920’s, the movie poster became even more important. Artists were hired to paint portraits of the stars for use on the posters. These artists also began to interpret scenes from the movie or the theme of the film and movie posters became works of art.

In answer to the introduction of television, the movie companies came out with bigger screens for large scale and 3-D movies. Drive-in movies were the rage, and movie posters evolved yet again adding color photographs of the major movie stars and using large stock lettering.

Movie posters were originally intended to be thrown away once the movie stopped being shown at the theater. As they became more artistic and as the popularity of movies and movie stars increased, people started collecting movie posters. Nowadays, movie posters are sold in many stores – both originals and reprints.

Here at Sherlock Holmes Movie Blog, we search the Internet to bring you movie posters from close to a century of Sherlock Holmes films.

The 1930′s movie posters include The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and more. The 1940′s movie posters featured Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, The Woman in Green and nine others.