This design looks so cheap to me, it’s just a bunch of random covers, there is no information about the movies presented in any way, the covers are way too big and take up an inordinate amount of space and there is nothing breaking up sections, design is just so fucking dumb now, fuck mobile
rant over 😅
Click on a cover to get more info.
Honestly it feels a bit like browsing a shelf of books or DvD boxes or something. It certainly could have some improvements but I don’t think this is that bad.
Everything about using the internet and its various “services” has turned to absolute garbage in the last 15 years.
I didn’t look at all the comments, but this is intentional. One of the streaming platforms (probably Netflix or Amazon) originally made an algorithm that tailors posters to the individual. It’s the usual A/B testing psychological bullshit designed to maximize your likelihood of watching a movie.
My wife watched The Get Down and another series I think it was called “Woke” (two series with predominantly black cast) back to back in the same weekend and the Netflix algorithm started to put the black character of every show as the center piece on every picture. Like we already watched house of card, we know that the black lobbyist guy is barely a support character, don’t try to fool us putting him in the center of the poster
I’m so happy I don’t have Netflix… That sounds extreamly manipulative. Interesting to know they do this but not surprising since it’s Netflix.
i try to use browser extensions that add movie ratings, so annoying
Even worse when the streaming site publishes it under multiple covers. So freaking annoying.
Way too often I see a cover I don’t recognize and think it might be something I’d like, but get a couple minutes in before realizing I’ve seen it before.
I imagine it’s marketing trying to see what cover gets the most clicks but at the cost of annoying its customers
Probably designed like that to increase click through
Because you have to click to work out wtf anything is.
The dangers of optimizing for the wrong numbers
Some marketer: “the click rate on this design is so much better than before, we will keep it!” And then not questioning or following up why
Seen it happening myself multiple times already
Those movie posters are for people who have already seen the movie or at least of knowledge of the story.
E: I’m guessing.
This is not really about the posters but the web design and a general lament for web design, those are also a problem tbh
You said it. Dogshit.
I’m so glad I’ve spent the last few years backing up the file of pretty much every bit of media I enjoy, because it’s the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
What difference are you seeing that I’m not?
A Netflix listing doesn’t need to be same as outside a movie theater. They can be more similar to a tv guide.
I think the main complaint is that your examples show detail about the movie, not just a close up of someone’s face
For example jaws has a giant shark attacking a person. Compare that to a close up of Bane’s face. You might not even realize it’s a batman movie of you aren’t familiar with it already.
Star wars poster shows space ships and laser sword.
Many movie posters are just the main characters now with head shots vs trying to tell a story.
I don’t full agree with the op, just my interpretation of what I think they are complaining about
I thought it was about the website design as opposed to the posters. Like why dont you get a small infobox for every movie with name, runtime, age-rating, plotsummary… Instead its just the posters
Yes you are correct it’s mainly about the web site design, but the posters deserve their own post
Bingo, movie posters have absolutely gone down hill. They all look the same now.
I can see it now that you mention it. Thanks for the insight!
Web/UI design in general has sucked for at least 14 years now. Everything is spaced too far apart and text/images are too big. Icons are used for critical functionality instead of words. Pointless animations and gradients slow everything down for no reason.
The thing that drives me the craziest is when a long title or sentence or whatever is just truncated with ellipses, even when there is ENORMOUS blank white space around it that would easily allow the whole thing to be shown with word-wrapping. Youtube shorts is the most egregious example of this, and they recently managed to make it even worse. It used to be that you could open up the comments for a short and that would make the entire long title readable, but they “fixed” that so it stays ellipsized even then.
The app I use at work to clock in and out ellipsizes my own name halfway through my middle name, and it could be easily fixed by just stretching the control that displays the name all the way to each edge. I used to be a mobile app developer and I know exactly why this happens: the UI designer uses a bogus short name like “Bob Smith” on the original design document and the developer who implements it puts in a control just big enough for that. I used to encounter this kind of thing and I would fix it with common sense, and then the UI designer would get mad and insist that my fix be reverted, even though that resulted in something that couldn’t display the information properly.
Icons are used for critical functionality instead of words.
Not just web ui. I’ve noticed this trend with applications as well. It’s much harder to learn new applications now because you have to look up a guide for everything. Hovering over the icons doesn’t even work as often as it should.
Because hovering/tooltips doesn’t work for touchscreens and designers don’t give two shits about anything else.
I just discovered a new function on my car - when I listen to music, a small rectangle appears with audio controls …… apparently it a tile that can be scrolled left and right to see other data. I never would have thought to try that if I didn’t read it somewhere, no visual cues
It’s ruled by clicks, rather than usefulness or friendliness
Mobile first! MoBiLE FiRsT!!!
What that?
AI?
AI FiRst!!
For some apps, like YouTube or Netflix is TV first now. Make sense having big spaced icons, instead of a screen packed with information
This is largely part of being on multilingual web. It costs a lot of engineering time and effort to try and translate a page to multiple languages, but icons infer meaning without this need.
My local movie theater in the heart of downtown has taken down all the movie posters outside the entrance and replaced them with a single screen that only shows ads for overpriced popcorn “deals”.
Before, anyone walking by knew which movies were currently playing; now, all they know is just how outrageously expensive the popcorn is.
I haven’t been to that theater since.
You should tell them.
Yeah, I guess I should. I just can’t quite understand how anyone could fail to realize how absurd it is for a movie theater to use its most prominent advertising space not for promoting its movie lineup, but for food offerings.
To me, this strongly suggests that this movie theater—which is part of a large chain—now sees its main product as food rather than movies.
I have absolutely no sympathy for that, and I can only applaud it when a company like that loses customers because of its own idiocy.
Movie theaters main products has always been food.
Movie theaters have never made money off the movies they show, they make their money off the food they sell. It has been that way for at least 50 years.
That may be so, but the popcorn with chemical “pee” has never been what pulls in customers. The movies were always the draw, even if food was the profit. Advertising that food seems short-sighted: who cares if you sell popcorn to a higher percentage of customers but you’re pulling in fewer customers
Not really “never”, but the standard movie deals have long called for the studios to get a 90% cut of the box for the first two weeks a movie runs, then it switches to a 50/50 split the rest of the way. Nobody seems to have noticed that this arrangement incentivizes movie studios to produce overhyped pieces of shit so that no good movie with serious staying power cannibalizes their own revenue stream. Just a total coincidence that most movies now are overhyped pieces of shit.
Don’t argue with me man, argue with the chain. They clearly agree with my position.
Food probably actually is their main product. Granted it’s been a very long time since I worked in a movie theatre but when I did they told us that of $14 or so of ticket price they only made about 50c and that candy bar sales were actually their real business.
Yes, that’s true, of course, but you’re not going to sell much if you don’t promote the lineup that actually draws in the customers, would you?
I mean, before, all you had to do was walk past the movie theater to find out what was playing. Like many others, I walk past it very often, and I’ve often spotted a movie that interested me and then come back a few days later to watch it.
Now I have to actively check their website to find out what movies are currently playing, which I don’t do very often.
The theater operators must be fully aware of this—as well as of the fact that the food options they’re now exclusively promoting are so expensive that they’re more likely to deter potential visitors than attract them.
It’s as if an attractive tourist destination were to advertise overpriced tourist-trap restaurants instead of the sights that make the destination appealing in the first place—and that would at least make the inflated prices somewhat understandable.
That should be obvious to any marketer or, for that matter, the management in charge. Customers, of course, aren’t interested in which products yield the highest profit margin for the company, but rather in what they get for their money—after all, no one goes to the movies for the popcorn, but for the films themselves. I’d say anyone who doesn’t understand that is completely out of place in this business. The experience has to be the movie; everything else is just an afterthought.
Who just walks past the movies and spontaneously decides to see a movie because they saw a poster for it at the movies?
I would wager pretty much no one. People plan to go to the movies to see a specific movie already. Advertising food and drinks is going to be more beneficial.
I usually goto the theater for a specific show, usually buy the ticket online ….
BUT, there are times, such as when I didn’t get a ticket ahead of time and my show is sold out, where I’m in front of the theater deciding whether to go in. It I see an interesting looking movie, I might see that. If the food advertising worked, it would have the opposite of the intended effect “why don’t we goto a restaurant instead ?”
How do you know your show is sold out?
There’s usually a signat the ticket booth. Maybe it’s alone, maybe title only,maybe it’s only visible from being at the window …. It’s generally not useful to pick an unexpected/unknown movie.
A good movie poster shows a snapshot of the genre, the basic plot, the main characters, all of which I might use to pick a movie
If it’s inconvenient to see my choices, If they make me go somewhere else, or goto their web site, I’m at least as likely to just leave
Well, I rarely plan to go to the movies—only on rare occasions, when I know a new movie I want to see is coming out.
I used to walk past the movie theater a lot, though, and see the posters and that’s how I found out about movies I didn’t know anything about or maybe knew of them but forgot. So it happened at least on occasion that I’d call some friends to go see the movie I’d just discovered by walking by the theater - on the weekend or something, not right away, of course.
I never really cared about the food options. Of course, I’d still buy popcorn and stuff, but a discount on it—after which the popcorn is still outrageously expensive—was just as little a motivation for me to go to the movies as any fancy seats or whatever. That’s all well and good, but it’s never been a reason for me to go to the movies. I went because of the movies—which I’d now have to research on my own, something I don’t do.
So: It may well be that I’m the exception. But in any case, I haven’t been to the movies since they replaced the posters with food ads. As I said, that’s simply because I don’t actively look up the lineup and therefore don’t realize that there might be a movie playing that would interest me—I certainly don’t care at all about the current popcorn prices, though.
I find it hard to believe that someone can be on Lemmy and not have any clue about what movies are currently out, coming out, or finds it too hard to type “what movies are on at the cinema” into DuckDuckGo or whatever the search engine of choice is on Linux these days.
Of course, I have a general idea. All I’m saying is that it was convenient to see what was playing at the movie theater when I walked by, as I do almost every day. You might not be able to imagine it, but the lineups also vary by country—even from city to city.
I just don’t actively look up the movie schedule, which I could do, of course. But I just don’t.
It’s like, say, the menu at a cafeteria: I could look it up online, but since you’re constantly walking past it at work anyway, it’s nice when the weekly menu is posted right in front of it. That way, you can see what’s for lunch even if you hadn’t actually planned on going to the cafeteria.
Dude come on… No one goes to the theater to find out what is playing there and no one has done that for well over a decade.
Your rant is silly.
Well, that’s how it was for me at least. The movie theater is right in the middle of town, which is why you’re constantly passing by it anyway. I don’t actively look up the current movie lineup, but I used to always be up to date because I passed by that theater almost every day and saw the posters.
Now I’m no longer informed about the current lineup, but instead only about the absurd prices for popcorn and stuff—I can’t say that motivates me to go to the theater’s website to see what’s playing.
Like I said: I haven’t been to the theater since they took down the posters. That’s not because tickets and popcorn would be too expensive for me, but because I have no idea which movies are playing right now. I don’t go out of my way to find out myself, but I used to walk past the theater and think, “Oh, cool, movie xyy is playing—I should go see that with friends this weekend.” That effect is now gone so I don’t go to the movies anymore.
So what should be glaringly clear to you is that you are no longer the target demographic for theater attendance. That information is all relayed through the app on the phone, as are ticket sales, seating arrangements and really the purchasing of food.
I guess I’m not the target demographic either then. I don’t think I ever was really, but as a parent of teens, if I do go in, it’s likely to be a family’s worth of tickets.
Maybe you think the rest of us are a minority that doesn’t matter but it seems short sighted to disregard potential customers
I have been going to the movies for about 50 years and I never found out what was in the theater by show up and walking up to the theater. I sure didnt do it when I was taking my family there, I did it with the news paper or calling…
Starting around 1999 I looked online.
Even young people don’t have the movie theater’s app because it’s completely useless. Only people who go to the movies regularly—and are therefore already regular customers—might use such an app. Of course, there are also promotional campaigns by the operators designed to encourage people to download their useless app—but I’m pretty sure most people only do that to get the discount and then delete the app right away.
Young people, in particular, can of course be reached through social media ads and the like, but you don’t seem to realize how expensive that is. I can hardly imagine that a local movie theater—or even a chain with many local locations—could achieve a halfway decent ROAS through this or other online marketing channels.
So in my opinion, it’s simply idiotic to ignore the prime advertising space this movie theater already has—after all, it costs almost nothing to hang a few extra posters on its own building. They could even do that alongside the food ads, which would make optimal use of this free advertising space. But they don’t do that; instead, they’ve removed all the movie posters for a single screen with food ads no one cares about.
I can’t understand the reason for that. If it has to be one or the other—which isn’t necessary at all—I think movie posters are much more effective. I mean, let’s be honest: Which is more useful to potential customers? Knowing which movie is currently playing—something you notice as you walk by, regardless of your age—or an ad for a small discount on tacos or something similar, that are still very expensive even after the discount?
Oh, and just to be clear: Of course, it doesn’t matter at all whether they’re actually posters or screens displaying the movie lineup.
The point is the informational value, which, of course, exists in the real world as well, not just online.
This may also be why they overly focus on blockbusters. Without traditional means of seeing what’s playing, I’m only aware of a movie if it’s been heavily advertised. You’d think trying the cheap route would be … cheaper
Yes, that seems plausible to me. I can’t say why the movie theater near me isn’t putting up posters or any info anymore, but since I don’t know the details that led to this decision, it simply seems like an awful idea on the part of management to me.
It could be that the film distributors no longer provide the necessary promotional material, though that also seems pretty silly, since it would hardly incur any significant costs. It is also possible that there are some major players that don’t want that because it would benefit them (small companies can’t compete with big capital that is needed for online ad campaigns).
Maybe it’s also due to some city regulations.
I can’t say for sure which or any of these might be the case, but I could very well imagine that it’s due to incompetence on the part of the theater’s operators. Although this is a nationwide, I think even international chain, that doesn’t seem to me to guarantee that there’s a plausible reason. Maybe it was a cost-cutting suggestion from a completely incompetent consultant who looked at some Excel spreadsheets and came up with the idea that the labor costs for putting up posters were an expense that could be cut. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.
But anyways, I just noticed that the movie schedule at my local theater is no longer visible when you walk by. To me, that’s a loss, and I think some others might feel the same way—because while you can, of course, find information online, since this is a local offering, it seems ridiculous to me not to provide the relevant information on-site as well, especially since it could be done very, very inexpensively.
UI’s for movie streaming services are not designed to help you find something to watch. They are designed to keep you “engaged”, which means in the platform and not realizing that the pool of actually interesting things is about as deep as a puddle. Everything about streaming sites’ design is user hostile and this is a classic example of that.
Isn’t Jellyfin the same design as all the streaming platform and they have nothing to gain for keeping you engaged?
Good point! Alongside the UX dev comment there’s probably a benefit in making the base theme familiar and easy to use for newcomers.
Funnily enough the first theme that shows for me on this site is a netflix theme 😅! https://jellywatch.app/hub/category/themes
Yeah but they don’t have highly paid UX design teams, so they’re probably just copying design choices on the basis that they’re trying to offer people a similar experience they can own.
Also, it’s FOSS so you can always make your own skin/theme.
Almost, but it has movie titles under the poster/cover and usually pulls the actual movie covers.
Once you click into it, it gives a shitton of detail about the movie.
Once you click into it, it gives a shitton of detail about the movie.
Is this not the case with netflix/hbo? Sorry i never actually used any streaming service before other than Jellyfin so i don’t understand what is the issue here
Two things off the top of my head:
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Jellyfin displays ratings from RT (and opencritic maybe?), while Netflix has stopped displaying their own user ratings years ago.
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Jellyfin displays the full cast and crew. When you click an actor, director,… it shows you other media where they appear, even individual episodes. Netflix has none of that.
Ohh, okay, that’s actually horrible.
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So does Netflix etc……
Jellyfin has like six different view types to pick from, including one that doesn’t even show images. And almost all the others show the title always visible below the preview image.
Jellyfin a) only has the content you feed it, so you already have some knowledge about it and b) you can expand it with plugins and make the design however you like it.
Everything others said, plus you can choose your client. For example, I use VoidTV for Jellyfin on my TV which offers a different design (though I use it because it’s the only Jellyfin client where DD video+audio work).
Yeah I suppose, you just gotta pick one thing and then it does the rest, or that’s what they want probs
I’m so here for this.
It’s genuinely infuriating to see a hundred years of movie poster art evolution discarded. It’s the first part of a movie’s artistic statement you ever see, and it gets summarily tossed in the trash so that Netflix’s internal overworked engagement metrics team can spend 2 minutes grabbing random shots of different stars in the film, slap single-color generic font text all over it, and target twelve versions to different demographics to try to get more clicks.
It’s even worse when I tell this to someone and they’re like, “I don’t really notice.”
Quite a few have popped up in the thread 😄
Yeeeup!
Oh my goodness thank you I finally feel vindicated like no one around me ever mentions anything about it, I do need some more friends lol, but yeah as someone who does design and appreciates good design and knows what a hell creatives put ourselves through to go through the process of making something people love and then it all gets reduced to garbage like this
Which of these just have a single colour generic font on them that isn’t literally the movies chosen font?
This isn’t the first time the aesthetic trend of film posters changed but I‘m sure every time it happened there was someone being grumpy about it.
You know what?! I was!!
Dreamworks knows what they did, homogenizing every single cover.
Social media told me gradeschoolers can’t read now. I guess they don’t want all those nonsense symbols everywhere.
It’s part of the infuriating trend on removing all words from UIs. God forbid the kids learn how to read a movie title. Using modern apps means navigating a never ending stream of hieroglyphs. The “save”, “load”, “new”, “share” buttons are long gone; replaced with an ever changing series of symbols.
Am I looking at a different picture to all of you? Every single movie poster there has the name in plain English.
Every.
Single.
One.
Are you all illiterate?
A lot of posters have stylized script in varying sizes and contrast to the background that generally looked fine on big posters but can be hard to read on small icons on a screen.
Just look at the Dune one in the example. Only the u and n are easy to see because the d and e habe no contrast with the background and the font is heavily stylized. Which Lord Rings and Hobbit movies are those? The subtitles are tiny as fuck.
You have to take the screen size into account. This isn’t a mobile view, this is meant for a big tv. Even on mobile if you look at it in a regular size you can easily and clearly read every single title.
On mobile the icons are about as big as my thumb. On a big screen they are about the size of my thumb held out at arms length. The ratio is basically the same and NO I cannot easily and clearly read every single title on mobile or at a distance, especially the three that I pointed out.
