What influence do film posters have?

A movie poster is used to advertise a film, often there are several variations of the posters displayed around. These images are shown all over cinemas (inside and out) down streets, at busstops, in magazines, etc.

The generic film poster includes text, a picture of the main character/s, the release date and some sort of tagline. There is likely to also be production crew credits - but only the main ones.

Despite being works of advertising art, movie posters don't seem to be a prevelent as they used to be. This may be due to all of the available information on the internet, allowing people to have access to videos, trailers and articles on the films. Doing some research into film posters, I have discovered that there are 2 main types of poster; Old and New.

The older posters have much more information on them. For example, the film poster for "Gone With The Wind" there is a lot of text, with reference to the soundtrack and all of the minor characters featured in the film. 

This is because when the film was created in 1939, film poster were very much all that movies had for advertisement. There were no trailers and the names featured on the posters were the main attraction for audiences as big names drew people in. This is why the main characters' faces take up 50% of the poster.

However, in more modern films, the posters do not contain nearly as much information. The majority include the basics; name, release date, main actor, etc. These are just as, if not more, effective than the older posters. They are much more minimilistic, making the poster look neater and they draw an audience in by not giving much away, encouraging people to go away and research it. This is do-able with resources such as the internet.

My example for a new poster is from "X-men Origins: Wolverine". It is extremely minimilistic, only showing a photo of the main character and its release date. The lack of actors, movie title, etc is due to the fact that this film is part of a series. It is the fourth out of all the X-men films, so this character has already been featured in 3 other films.

The majority of people are likely to know that Hugh Jackman is the actor who plays the wolverine character, who is renowned for his metal claws, therefore by having the claws as the main focus of the poster, people should immediatly think - oh, that's Wolverine.

Therfore, I feel that for this time and age, using less text and more images would make my poster more effective as it would have a much more modern feel to it.