Eternal Sonata or Trusty Bell: Chopin's Dream? You have to admire that direct of a title, but points off for the lazy, probably last-minute addition of a drifting cloud head. Hey everyone, there's a girl in here!
A derogatory term referring to the tendency in modern
Film Posters and
DVD cover art to have a black background with the faces of the lead actors above the name of the movie.
Generally felt to be a lazy approach, as it requires little in the way of creativity and imagination, and leads to many DVD releases looking all but indistinguishable on the shelf.
It is particularly bad when other publicity materials such as teaser posters have looked different and distinctive, but the final poster is floating heads. Or even the theatrical posters have been distinctive, but the DVD art has the syndrome.
A type of
Contemptible Cover.
When done with the
villain, it is
Evil Overlooker. Often overlaps with
Sean Connery Is About To Shoot You.
Not to be confused with when heads literally float as a magical side effect of
Losing Your Head, or
Huge Holographic Head.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- It's also quite common in comic books, particularly back in the 60's and 70's in team books, where they'd have one character doing something interesting in the middle and every other member of the team as just a floating head watching the action.
Film
- All the current Star Wars DVDs suffer from this.
- Give My Regards To Broad Street, 2000s DVD release (taken to the minimalist extreme; the original posters also had a dash of this.)
- Some posters for A Hard Days Night, including the ones the various AHDN album covers use.
- The cover of the Silent Hill movie was fan designed, and features the floating head of a mouthless Sharon Da Silva/Alessa Gillespie. Far from being annoying or funny, though, this one is just plain unnerving.
- After the distinctive use of logo without text for the 1989 film Batman, the marketing division apparently decided to embrace this trope. The primary posters and video covers for Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin all use this approach, with the first two using variants of the logo for their teaser posters. This got dumped when the series was rebooted.
- The Dark Knight did this
◊ (there was also an individual poster for each face), though it at least pulls it off with some style.
- While not technically "floating heads" per se, the DVDs of the James Bond films dumped the distinctive posters for shots of Bond with a Pistol Pose in front of the most memorable set from the film. Calling them prosaic would be an understatement. One can just tell that the marketing executives wanted to hide the age of the films by redoing all the covers (since the posters are all pretty indicative of their eras).
- The most common poster◊ for Iron Man did it too. This carried over to the Vanilla Edition DVD cover, and the two-disc edition has packaging exclusive to Target stores that is literally a plastic Iron Man face◊.
- Posters for the Harry Potter films have followed◊ this◊ on occasion.
- Alien Resurrection. And the Aliens DVD (with the Alien's head!).
- The promotional posters for No Country For Old Men featured Llewelyn Moss as a tiny figure fleeing desperately from the looming visage of the inexorable Anton Chigurh, the composition of the image reflecting the story's contemplation of trying in vain to outrun fate. For the DVD cover? Floating Heads!
- Disney ignored the excellent Art Deco poster it made for The Rocketeer and
coked cooked up a Floating Head Syndrome cover as part of their effort to make the Lamest DVD Ever.
- Disney also gave The Gnome-Mobile worse◊.
- All Pirates Of The Caribbean DVDs, especially when the cast grows.
- DVD/Posters of
the first two all three movies of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy (theatrical editions only; the special editions had polished art.)
- The Fifth Element, or - as the goons call it - Guy being chased by cops and three big heads.
- A slipcase edition of Independence Day was simply a flaming Earth with Will Smith's head floating above it. Thankfully, the actual cover remains the same.
- Lampshaded in dialogue by The Mist: after a thunderstorm demolishes the main character's studio, destroying the (amazing) movie artwork he had been painting, he laments that the studio will just opt for "some floating heads" instead of extending his deadline.
- We wonder what cracked-up alternate universe Michael Moore film was viewed by the Japanese person paid to design the Floating Head to end them all◊.
- One of the posters for Scorsese's The Aviator, which carried over to the DVD cover. It frankly looks like a plane being chased by a giant floating Leonardo DiCaprio head.
- K-19: The Widowmaker or Harrison Ford's head is judging you◊. Also available with bonus Liam Neeson in some editions.
- Almost all of the Star Trek movies do this. Insurrection goes for the Evil Overlooker instead.
- A good deal of posters and DVD covers for the Terminator series are simply pictures of the titular cyborg's head. Many of these show off the "part man, part machine" aspect.
Live Action TV
- When serials from the original series of Doctor Who were released on VHS in the 1990s, most of them had beautiful paintings commissioned specially for them. After 1997, this stopped and was replaced by stock photos generically overlayed on a swirling background. The artwork for the subsequent DVD releases isn't a great deal more inspiring.
- Several of these also made a great deal of effort to conceal the more prominent Special Effects Failures present within the original series; in one particularly egregious example, the cover to the release of "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" features realistic, detailed dinosaur models. The actual story? Not so much.
- This troper has a painting of Heroes in which it the main cast from the first season is a bunch of floating heads looking in random directions.
Web Original
