The new Rogue Trooper movie poster looks like it fell out of a ’70s cinema

The new Rogue Trooper poster by Paolo Rivera, for Duncan Jones’ upcoming movie, has been revealed, and, honestly, it feels like it’s time-travelled in from a completely different era of movie marketing, the good one, where posters were hand-painted, weirdly dramatic, and sometimes better than the films they were selling.

It’s the perfect fit for the film’s comic book roots, one I’ve loved since reading 2000AD in the early ‘80s, and shows how even a film being made in Unreal Engine 5 can tap into its pulpy papery roots. With its bold shapes, loose brushwork, and muted colour palette, the poster feels perfectly handmade rather than composited from 20 layers in Photoshop, and leans hard toward classic movie-poster illustration.

Rogue Trooper himself stands front and centre, rendered in Rivera’s painterly style, with just enough grit and atmosphere to make it feel like a lost print from a dusty cinema lobby. It’s a style that’s caught fans' attention, with replies to the reveal on Twitter/X full of admiration. “It's a brilliant piece of work. I love Rogue, and I'm looking forward to the movie, but I also love the classic retro feel to this poster. It's got the same feeling as The Guns Of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen or Kelly's Heroes. It's gorgeous”, commented Hugh Parker on Twitter/X.

Because, let’s be honest, many modern movie posters feel like an interchangeable blend of floating heads and a bit of smoke, job done. This, on the other hand, actually interprets the film, taps into its comic heritage and delivers a unique illustration fans can enjoy. Okay, so there are movie posters trying new things – from Alien Romulus to Hamnet designs – and illustrator Matt Ferguson has done some incredible work with major franchises such as Blade Runner, Fantastic 4 and Star Wars, but on the whole, modern mainstream poster design remains stoically safe.

Which makes the whole thing even more interesting when you remember what the new Rogue Trooper movie actually is – an Unreal Engine 5 animated movie, that’s as much about making use of modern cutting-edge, real-time rendered techniques as anything else. This poster, though, shows that future-facing filmmaking hasn’t lost its roots.

So you’ve got this slightly perfect collision, where the film is pushing into the next generation of tech, and the artwork everyone’s sharing looks back to the ’70s and ’80s, when posters were tactile, expressive and pulpy. And maybe that’s the point, because for all the advances in tools and pipelines and rendering, this is the image people are stopping for, and it's getting fans excited for a movie made in the most modern way.