I love Eva Mendes as much as the next guy, but why is she all of a sudden the focal point of all marketing for this winter’s comic book movie Will Eisner’s The Spirit? Today we have two very different The Spirit character movie posters featuring Eva Mendes as Sand Saref.
The first poster is one of the best character theatrical posters I’ve seen in a while. It sticks to the same color scheme of red, white and black that The Spirit’s previous promotional posters used, and it uses a quote as one of its focal points like The Spirit’s three piece teaser promo posters did. I actually like the way the poster focuses on Mendes’s face and the way the diamond necklace falls from her mouth.
The second Eva Mendes as Sand Saref movie poster is your basic comic book character poster with Ms. Mendes in a generic action pose. Sand Saref, for those interested, is “the Spirit’s childhood sweetheart who turned to crime” later in life. (link) One bit of really good news comes from director/comic book writer Frank Miller’s The Spirit blog.
He acknowledges the backlash of fans concerned that he had changed the Spirit’s classic look from blue to black and the fact that the movie’s teaser trailer looked exactly like his previous film Sin City. I think Miller actually handled both concerns really well, going so far as to say he was so happy people cared enough about the character and the movie to start a fuss. (link) My biggest concern was that Miller had turned The Spirit feature film into another Sin City movie because of how similar the two were in look and feel. He puts my concerns to rest, at least for now, by saying:
And The Spirit as some sort of Sin City Redux? No, Sin City, that one's my own baby, folks, and it looks the way it does for its own reasons. The Spirit is, and will always be, Eisner's Spirit. Anybody watching me on the set could attest that I very frequently drew a storyboard for a given shot first as I saw it, then as Will might’ve seen in—and, in every case, went with what I saw as Will's version.If you’d like to find out more on Miller’s reasoning for changing the Spirit’s classic look from blue to black then click here to read his most recent blog post.
To drive the point home, The Spirit, despite any accidental impression left by that kickass teaser-trailer, is a full-color movie. Sin City—and I hope to make of it a movie trilogy all its own, come Hell and high water—is, visually, a playhouse for black and white. (link)
