Friday One Sheet: STRAYS

Here is the tail (sorry...) of two very different marketing campaigns for a Universal Studios R rated talking dog movie, Strays.

USA versus Germany.

In the United States, the movie star names are almost as big as the photos of the dogs. Text highlighting naughty-but-fun pictures from the producing team sits at the top, and the R rating is emphasized by having it gripped by one of the dog's teeth. A high contrast, if lazy, red background exists as a slightly more subtle warning, perhaps.

And then there is the show-don't-tell approach of Germany, which makes it glaringly obvious that this is not a children's movie. (Strangely they highly TED vs. 21 Jump Street at the top, maybe the Seth McFarlane did better than the Phil Lord/Chris Miller TV adaptation). Lest you think the black and white stamp is a 'content advisory' in the German poster, it is not. Rather, it is a much smaller voice credit than the monster sized credits in USA key art; one that is also bearing the appearence of the USA music-advisory logo. Strange but true.

The German tagline, "This summer, it comes from behind," is equally naughty.  Does the German poster require a high contrast red backdrop to stand out?  Nope. The image of desecrated lawn ornaments does the job. If you wish to get more subtle, the 'Roman Church' style font, and the changing of the title not to German, but rather to slang, Doggy Style, further cements that (ironically) American design house, Concept Arts (who did the German Version) leaning into the film far harder than when the design for overseas markets.