Film Preview: Vampire Academy (2014)

Poster

Additional posters can be found below.

Trailer Link

Release Date:

February 7, 2014

Synopsis:

From IMDb: “Rose Hathaway is a Dhampir, half human/vampire, guardians of the Moroi, peaceful, mortal vampires living discretely within our world. Her legacy is to protect the Moroi from bloodthirsty, immortal Vampires, the Strigoi. This is her story.”

Poster: B- / C / C- / D / D / D+ (3) / C+ / C- / D+

Review: (#1 & #2) The first design may lack a richness of detail, but the simple, elegant school crest sets the tone better than the second design. Perhaps highlighting the characters of the film being predominantly female might help relate it to the tween audience it hopes to attract, but the green wash doesn’t make much sense.

(#3-#5) The third design just minimizes the title of the second and tries to give the film a catchy (read: cheesy) tagline. The fourth adds color that might make it more appealing to girls (pink? really?) and the fifth tries adding spice to the second and reducing the amount of pink.

(#6-#8) Three character designs that, apart from color aren’t really that interesting and the colors themselves are unnecessarily garish.

(#9-#11) I’ll give credit to the 9th design as it seems a bit more in tune with traditional poster designs and doesn’t go out of its way to try to set the film apart from others of its ilk. Toning things down can only help, right? The tenth design returns to the roots of the prior posters, but pastels the purple. That isn’t a great move. Meanwhile, the eleventh design looks like something that might have been the start of another character poster set, but there was nothing else available at the time. It also reminds me of V.I. Warshowski, which isn’t necessarily a good comparison.

Trailer: C+ / B

Review: It’s hard to believe that a film based on a book called Vampire Academy could look more resolutely bland than the title suggests, but the trailer designers have managed to weed out anything remotely engaging about the film. Either that or there isn’t much there to engage with anyway.

(#2) There may not be much there to begin with, but this second trailer does a much better job conveying this film as something like an awkward tween romantic comedy with bite, pun intended. It still looks like it will probably be a big stinker, but at least you could have a little bit of fun waiting for it to fail.