‘True Detective’ season 2: HBO joins the motion-poster movement

We have to be honest here: We don’t understand the whole motion-poster movement. We don’t find that there is anything about seeing an advertisement in GIF format that makes it more appealing to us. Why just not create a really cool poster that doesn’t have all of the same frills attached to it?

Anyway, we come today bearing the latest poster from “True Detective” season 2, which uses a tiny bit of motion to go along with the tagline of “we get the world we deserve.” There are a couple of things that we personally find somewhat bizarre about this poster from the onset:

1. There is no familiar face featured. Given that you have reasonably big names in Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn, why not show one of them here?

2. What is going on under the bridge? We get that the show is trying to be a little cryptic by focusing on the infrastructure just as much as anything underneath it, but this is almost too implicit for the show’s own good.

Ultimately, it feels like the show is potentially trying a little too hard with this poster, since the only thing we really get a sense of here is that transportation is a theme of this season. If this was a true-to-life story set in California, we imagine that most of it will feature Colin and Vince sitting in traffic for hours on end cursing their lives.

The truth here is that HBO has some catching up to do now in the marketing / poster department. A good piece of advice for them would be to go look at what FX is doing, as that network has created many a sensational poster for “The Americans,” “American Horror Story,” and are the leaders in great promotional artwork.

What do you think about this poster? Share below, and click here for some other updates on “True Detective” season 2 right now. Also, sign up here to get some other news on everything we cover via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: HBO.)