When designing a movie poster, one of the most important choices you make will be which colors you use. The colors set the mood and tone of the poster and cause a certain group of people to gravitate toward it. Knowing which colors are generally the most popular will help you to choose the right colors for your poster printing project, so here is a description of colors most often used for movie posters.

Black
Black is the the most popular color used in movie poster printings according to Dark and Fleshy:The Color of Top Grossing Movies. This fact is not exactly surprising since black gives the feeling of drama. After all, doesn’t the theater go black before the movie starts? And similar to the reason we watch movies in the dark, black makes colors pop. For these reasons and more, black is the color of choice for the background of most movie posters, especially for those geared toward teenage and adult audiences.

Brown
Brown is used a lot in movie posters for similar reasons that black is used: it is dark and provides a lot of contrast for other colors, and it is also somewhat dramatic.

Red
Red has a reputation as a provocative color for good reason. Scientists have found that looking at something red actually raises people’s blood pressure. For this reason, red is used a lot in poster printing designs for sexy movies.

Flesh Tones
Flesh tones predominate because of the depictions of the actors. After all, it’s the actors that draw many people into a movie.

White
Probably because it provides the greatest contrast to black, white is the most commonly used accent color in movie poster printing designs. It is used for lettering and to highlight certain elements of the poster against the black background.

Primary Colors
Primary colors (red, green, and blue) tend to show up mainly in movies made for young audiences. Animated films especially tend to have brightly colored movie posters.  

Keep in mind the above popular colors for your next movie poster design, and maybe yours will be the next most intriguing item in poster collections.