Class Up Your Game Room with Art

French Creature Movie Poster

Part 1 — Movie Posters for the Game Room

Game room decor is important. A game room with blank walls shows a lack of class, culture, and creativity. So why not put some great art up on your game room walls?

Art can be viewed as a fun alternative investment, similar to game room equipment. Pinball machines, in particular, are great at keeping their value (or even going up in value). You can enjoy the item, all the while knowing the game can be sold for what you invested in it (or more.)

Plenty of gamers have a home theater element within their game room. So let’s begin with movie posters as a game room decor enhancement.

Original Movie Posters

Original movie posters are those made by the studio to advertise the movie. Buy original first printings only for your game room. Secondary pressings or later copies are not something you want to collect. Often these are barely worth paper they are printed on and long-term desirability is low. Spend a bit extra and get a true original pressing of a poster.

Kill Bill by Tyler Stout
Kill Bill by Tyler Stout

Say you want something like a Creature from the Black Lagoon. Well an original poster from this classic can run into the thousands of dollars. Not everyone has that kind of money. So what do you do in this case? Buy a foreign pressing. I was able to purchase an original French version of the Creature poster. The artwork was different, but still is gorgeous and was available for hundreds instead of thousands of dollars.

Genre and popularity are important. Buy what you like, but remember that certain genres seem to appreciate and hold their value better than others. Think about movies from the past decade. Something like Kill Bill will likely be a collectable 30 years from now, whereas The King’s Speech (despite being an award-winning movie) probably will not.

Don’t pay retail and know the value before you buy. The old saying goes “you make your money on the sale.” That means buy at the right price. Keep track of your desired item by monitoring eBay auctions. This will give you a good idea of the street value.

Buying a poster from a retail art or poster shop can be an expensive mistake. These businesses have high overhead and have to increase pricing accordingly.

Movie Poster Remakes

The past few years have seen growth in the popularity of independently commissioned movie posters. These posters are not created for the marketing of the films by the studio, but instead are created for a specific theater or showing by an outside source.

Evil Dead by Olly Moss

The recent leader of this movement is Mondo. Mondo is the poster arm of arguably America’s coolest movie theater — The Alamo Drafthouse.

Mondo works with a variety of artists. They sell posters in their store in Austin, Texas and whatever is left is sold online. Online sales are announced at a random time via Twitter and are sold out within minutes.

Mondo prints are limited editions and are printed on very high quality papers. Some posters feature metallic or even glow-in-the-dark inks.

Mondo works with a variety of great artists. Some notable Mondo artists are:

Tyler Stout

Tyler Stout is absolutely huge right now. His posters sell out instantly and end up on eBay the same day at double the original cost or more. Tyler has created posters for some very cool movies such as Kill Bill, The Big Lebowski, The Thing (John Carpenter version), Iron Man 2, Captain America, Star Wars, and Big Trouble in Little China.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Todd Slater

Olly Moss

Olly Moss is a master at taking the theme of a movie and finding a simplistic design that says it all. He is simply brilliant and has a great retro style (think Saul Bass). Some better examples of his work are Dirty Harry, The Evil Dead, Rocky, and The Deer Hunter.

Todd Slater

Todd Slater‘s posters often look like they were done by needlepoint. This is a very cool effect and some of his best posters are stunning. My favorite of his is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Some other good ones are Yoda: The Great Warrior, Office Space, and Planet of the Apes.

That is it for our look at movie posters for your game room, look for part two of this series to investigate other great types of art for your game room.

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