Last month, Marvel announced that they’ll be releasing a 10-disc, six-movie Blu-ray collector’s set called Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One – Avengers Assembled.  The ginormous set will include all of Marvel’s films up through The Avengers, as well as loads of special features.  Now Marvel has released some truly gorgeous box art for the set, as Matthew Ferguson has cooked up some fantastic sleeves to go with each corresponding movie.  The sleeves will house each individual movie, while the actual box for the whole set looks like it’ll be in the shape of a briefcase.

If you’re the kinda guy who can recite classic movie lines like, “Leave the gun; take the cannoli” on command in between handfuls of popcorn, you may want a pop culture print, painting, or sculpture in your home theater with a little personality, right?

What better conversation starter or way to warm up a cinema space than with an original masterpiece from David O’Keefe Studios (davidokeefe.com).

The passionate pop culture artist—who has a solo gallery in Sarasota, Florida, but is based out of Tampa—nails it with his caricatures of everyone from his laugh-out-loud Animal House tribute, Knowledge Is Good, to his sepia-toned, spot-on, gun-toting Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, which by the way, is one of O’Keefe’s favorites and on the gallery’s most requested list. “Caddyshack is another staple for us,” he adds.

O’Keefe is the first to admit that his masterpieces are geared toward men—guys who have man caves or media rooms and want something special for that space. Not surprisingly, there are some core favorites among the movie, sports, and music icons that O’Keefe illustrates. Seinfeld is a huge favorite for TV fans. Sports nuts are eating up the Tim Tebow stuff.

The statement piece for movie aficionados is the original Godfather painting—La Famiglia—which took a full year to complete—outfitted in a custom frame complete with the signature horse head, healthy representation of cherubs with tommy guns, and the church where the baptism took place. In all its dark majesty, it carries an $80,000 price tag (we hear it’s negotiable). But don’t worry; there are plenty of points of entry for those without deep pockets. A small original paper piece goes for as little as $40.

Interestingly, O’Keefe creates his art—and is so adeptly able to capture the likeness and personas of his pop culture icons—with a technique that has served him well. “I don’t like to work from photos; I like to work from video.” For the Godfather piece, he says, he watched the movie over and over and over to capture the distinctive personalities.

While the Coppola movie is one of the best ever, grants O’Keefe, he was able to name his favorite film without hesitation. “Oh, Goodfellas,” he laughs. “It’s the best comedy ever written.” We’ll be buying that print as soon as it’s ready!

It would seem that movie-goers don’t want our stars looking us in the eye anymore. We just want it quick, dirty, and, most importantly, from behind.

Earlier today we saw the release of the first poster for the upcoming M. Night Shyamalan-directed sci-fi thriller After Earth, but if you’ve been paying attention to the film world over the last few months you probably realized that the design is very similar to some other recently released posters for 2013 blockbusters. In fact, it almost seems that every movie that is set to debut next year is getting a different version of the same poster.

Don’t believe me? Well, let’s do some quick mental time travel all the way to late September when the folks over at Dreamworks Animation released this poster for The Croods:

About a month later Marvel Studios unveiled this piece for Iron Man 3:

Then earlier this month we got the first one-sheet for Paramount Picture’s Star Trek Into Darkness:

That was followed just four days later by Universal Pictures’ Oblivion:

And then another four days passed and Warner Bros. Jack The Giant Slayer came out with this:

Just to cement the point, here’s the poster for Columbia Pictures’ After Earth:

For those keeping score, that’s six practically identical 2013 movie posters from six different studios that were all released within four months of each other (and four came from December alone). Obviously I’m not naďve enough to think that this is a brand new thing. Not only have movie studios reduced the number of poster templates in general down to about 10, they’ve even been doing the behind-the-back look for a while now – and it was popularized by this pair of pieces from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight:

Though it’s been happening for years now and the diminishing amount of creativity in Hollywood has been long apparent, it is now becoming a legitimate problem. It’s one thing for studios to release stupid, generic designs a couple times over the course of a year, but when they’re all released at the exact same time there is a danger of homogenization. Serious film fans may not have the problem, but is a casual movie-goer going to look at the posters for Oblivion and After Earth and know the difference? Absolutely not. They’re going to be processed mentally as the exact same thing, and how does that help either film?

What’s funny about the whole situation is that it will end up being the studios that are hurt by flooding the market with material like this. If everything looks the same people will have to decide whether they want to spend money on the same thing twice. And that’s going to hurt at the box office.

Repetitive designs like these come from excessive market research and testing, so it’s very likely that people do actually respond to the “hero’s back to the camera” poster, but marketing folks have to start pumping the brakes. Otherwise they may as well just go with pure grey backgrounds with movie titles on them.