Interstellar Movie Posters – Inside the 2014 Campaign

Several unusual Interstellar posters have passed through Art of the Movies over the years. Three in particular kept nagging at us.

They are original, single-sided sheets measuring roughly 27 × 39 inches. They carry interstellarmovie.net rather than interstellarmovie.com, and they came to us together from a source close to Warner Bros.

For a long time, we described them as early European material.

Further research suggests that description was probably too simple.

Trying to work out what they actually are sent us back through the original Interstellar campaign, and into a rather interesting story about how Christopher Nolan’s film was advertised.

The first teaser trailer appeared in December 2013 and gave very little away. Much of it used archive footage of real-world exploration while Matthew McConaughey spoke about mankind’s appetite for discovery.

One of the final images showed a rocket rising beyond a cornfield. The INTERSTELLAR title ran vertically through the sky, following the line of the launch.

The first Interstellar teaser trailer ended with a distant rocket rising beyond a cornfield, with the title following its path vertically into the sky.

When the first teaser poster appeared the following May, the same idea was still there.

Two small figures stand beside a farmhouse. Above them, a column of light and stars rises through the centre of the image, with the title set vertically inside it. It can look like a launch vehicle, an exhaust trail or simply a route away from Earth.

The poster was produced by BLT Communications and carried the line:

MANKIND WAS BORN ON EARTH. IT WAS NEVER MEANT TO DIE HERE.

There are no prominent faces or obvious spacecraft, and very little clue as to where the film might be heading.

The first Interstellar teaser poster appeared in May 2014. The design is credited to BLT Communications and carries the line “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.”

That restraint also created a problem for the people advertising the film. Interstellar had to be sold as a major Christopher Nolan event without revealing very much about what audiences were going to see.

By September, the campaign had found another way of doing it: rather than asking one image to explain the whole film, different posters could reveal different parts of it.

Four new designs began appearing between 16 and 19 September 2014. All four are credited to Concept Arts.

One showed Cooper alone in a frozen landscape. Another returned to the farm, now with Cooper and Murph beneath the stars. A third showed the Endurance in space with the wonderfully economical GO FURTHER. The fourth put the astronauts in shallow water on another world.

Four Interstellar designs documented appearing between 16 and 19 September 2014. All four are credited to Concept Arts.

Put the Farm poster beside the May teaser and the connection is obvious.

Both use:

MANKIND WAS BORN ON EARTH. IT WAS NEVER MEANT TO DIE HERE.

The setting is familiar too: Earth below, the stars above, people looking towards them. In May those people are tiny and anonymous. By September they are Cooper and Murph.

Pablo Matilla, who worked at Concept Arts, discussed the Interstellar campaign with El País in 2021.

Elsewhere, Matilla has described producing dozens of poster ideas for a single film, sometimes while shooting is still underway and with surprisingly little material to work from. Most are never chosen.

With Interstellar, Matilla referred to “the poster art prior to my own” and described other approaches developed for the campaign in terms of different aspects of the story: the journey through space, Cooper’s emotional relationship with his daughter and the adventure of the group.

Those descriptions seem to fit the Endurance, Farm and Water designs closely.

Matilla identified his own Interstellar poster as the one showing Cooper alone in the ice.

 The Ice design. Pablo Matilla identifies this Interstellar payoff poster as his own work, showing Cooper alone in the frozen landscape.

That matters because the four September posters are all credited to Concept Arts, but an agency credit is not the same thing as an individual designer attribution. At the moment, Ice is the only one of the four that we can firmly put Matilla’s name to.

He also said that one of the most important things the poster needed to communicate was simply Christopher Nolan. Matilla has talked more generally about the tension between making an arresting image and still giving an audience enough reason to see the film.

Look at Ice and you can see how little it tries to explain. Cooper is small in the landscape and looks exposed rather than heroic. There is no ensemble of stars and no spacecraft dominating the image.

Steve Chorney’s unused Interstellar artwork takes a very different route.

Credit: Artwork: Steve Chorney

McConaughey dominates the composition, surrounded by other characters, spacecraft and several ingredients from the film.

Chorney labels it simply as unused poster art. We do not know who commissioned it, when it was produced or how close it came to being used, so there is no point pretending otherwise. We have asked Steve what he remembers.

The posters that were used contain another clue.

At the bottom of some is:

interstellarmovie.com

On others:

interstellarmovie.net

The web address turns out to tell us more than we first realised.

Paramount handled the North American release, while Warner Bros handled international distribution. Contemporary publicity paired InterstellarMovie.com with the main US campaign and interstellarmovie.net with the UK-facing international campaign. Warner Bros UK’s own release material also used the .net address.

But those were not the only addresses used.

By the beginning of October, the campaign was also directing audiences to a Google-hosted site at interstellar.withgoogle.com. On 3 October, Paramount and Google formally announced an extensive partnership around Interstellar, with the new Interstellar Space Hub becoming the film’s official website.

The withgoogle.com address appears on later North American advertising, including posters promoting the special 70mm IMAX, 70mm and 35mm film screenings beginning on 5 November.

So the URL at the bottom of an Interstellar poster can tell us something about both territory and where the poster sits within the campaign.

The same Ice artwork appeared with three different web addresses: interstellarmovie.com, interstellarmovie.net and, later in the campaign, interstellar.withgoogle.com. The differences reflect both distribution territory and the evolution of the campaign as release approached.

Farm is a good example of the Paramount-Warner distinction. The US version carries the November release information and interstellarmovie.com. The Warner version carries COMING SOON and interstellarmovie.net. The same distinction can be seen on Go Further.

Ice is more revealing still.

The design documented on 16 September carried interstellarmovie.com. A Warner version exists with interstellarmovie.net. Later North American release advertising used the same Ice artwork with interstellar.withgoogle.com, alongside details of the 70mm IMAX, 70mm and 35mm screenings beginning on 5 November.

Water was also promoted through Paramount’s US campaign, while our Warner-linked Water sheet carries the .net address.

There is no single URL rule that works for every Interstellar poster. Some territories localised the campaign further — Germany, for example, used its own film website — and the Google partnership introduced another address late in the US campaign. But that makes the URLs more useful, not less: read alongside the rest of the poster, they can help identify both the market and the stage of the campaign.

Which brings us back to those 27 × 39 posters.

The three unusual 27 × 39 inch, single-sided Interstellar posters handled by Art of the Movies. All carry interstellarmovie.net and came to us together from a Warner-connected source.

Here is what we know about the three AotM examples.

They measure approximately 27 × 39 inches.

They are single-sided.

They carry interstellarmovie.net.

They came to us together from a source close to Warner Bros.

We had assumed the size meant that 27 × 39 was some sort of standard European or international Interstellar format. The evidence now suggests otherwise.

Conventional international Interstellar one sheets also exist at 27 × 40 inches and are double-sided. We have handled those too, and they can carry exactly the same Warner .net address.

So the odd size and single-sided printing need another explanation.

Film/Art Gallery provides an important comparison. It has offered an approximately 27 × 39 inch, single-sided Interstellar poster which it described as a Warner Bros test print poster, sourced from the collection of a former Warner Bros employee.

So at least one comparable Warner-connected sheet has surfaced with former Warner employee provenance and was described as a test print.

It does not tell us that our three sheets were test prints.

That is the part we have to infer.

Given their dimensions, single-sided construction, .net campaign address and Warner-connected provenance, we think they may have come from the same sort of test, proof or campaign-development process.

They might have been called test prints. They might have been proofs, presentation sheets or something else entirely.

We do not have the Warner paperwork that would settle it.

What we can say is that they are not simply standard international one sheets, and that the unusual physical features now have a better explanation than the one we had before.

That is enough to refine how we describe them.

A digital image will show you the artwork. It will not necessarily tell you whether the sheet in front of you is 27 × 40 or 27 × 39, single- or double-sided, or which campaign URL sits in the bottom margin.

In this case, those small physical details helped separate the Paramount and Warner versions and showed that even the US campaign changed as release approached. They also pointed us towards a part of the Interstellar poster-production process that is rarely documented.

Sources and further reading

• Space.com — Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ Trailer Lifts Off with NASA Footage
• The Hollywood Reporter — ‘Interstellar’: New Teaser Poster Debuts
• IMP Awards — May teaser, Ice, Farm, Go Further and Water
• The Playlist — 16 September 2014, 17 September, 18 September, and The Hollywood Reporter — 19 September
• El País — interview with Pablo Matilla
• Experimenta — interview with Pablo Matilla on the key-art process
• Paramount Pictures — Interstellar co-production and distribution announcement
• We Are Movie Geeks — US and international Interstellar campaign details
• Warner Bros — Interstellar UK release material
• Steve Chorney — official portfolio
• Film/Art Gallery — Warner Bros 27 × 39 Interstellar test print
• Heritage Auctions — 27 × 40 double-sided Interstellar one sheets
• Paramount Pictures — Interstellar on Film November 5th, Two Days Before Its Wide Release
• Paramount Pictures — Google & Paramount Pictures Team Up for a First-of-Its-Kind Movie Partnership for Interstellar