Name-Face Mismatch Poster
Movie stars like to have their importance recognized with top billing. This means they want their name to come first in the list of stars and their face in the most prominent position on the movie posters and DVD covers.
With one or two characters on a poster, this isn't a problem. Once you have a Trio of main characters however, then the standard design is to have the main character and biggest star in the center with the two supporting characters set back slightly on each side. But the main character still has to have top billing, and that means his name comes first... over the secondary characters head while the next big name appears over the main characters head. In fact it's common in these cases that none of the stars appear against the right name.
A Sub-Trope of Misplaced Names Poster.
Film
- Con Air, starring Nicolas Cage as John Malkovich, John Malkovich as John Cusack and John Cusack as Nic Cage.
- Undercover Brother
- One version of the Hoodwinked poster has the main characters holding police line-up signs with the characters names and voice actors. Strangely two of the characters are holding signs with the names of completely different characters and actors, who happen to be "bigger" names even though their parts are practically cameos.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Keira Knightley gave a stunning performance as Captain Barbossa.
- Shrek—Mike Myers did great as Princess Fiona. Though, this is the album cover, not the movie poster.
- The DVD cover of Edison Force features Morgan Freeman as Justin Timberlake, LL Cool J as Morgan Freeman, Justin Timberlake as LL Cool J, and Kevin Spacey badly photoshopped in.
- The poster/DVD cover of Gangs of New York features Cameron Diaz as Bill the Butcher.
- A quite serious offender is the main poster for Batman Returns, which switches the places of Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny De Vito. Not like you're not going to distinguish them, but still...
- The cover for the special edition DVD of Goodfellas has this. The posters, thankfully, got it right.
- The poster for Locked Down. Apparently, Vinnie Jones has turned into a large, Scary Black Man. So has Bai Ling.
- According to The Rock's poster, Nicolas Cage Is About To Shoot You.
- Played with in the poster for Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde. The color of the stars' names should tip you off.
- Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston on the poster for Just Go with It.
Video Games
- In Left 4 Dead 2, sometimes the player names for their according characters can be out of place in Custom Campaigns if the author failed to avert this oversight.