Best 1980s Movie Posters UK — Scarface, The Terminator, Batman & More

Brian De Palma · James Cameron · Tim Burton · Stanley Kubrick — the blockbuster decade as museum-grade wall art from £3

The 1980s is the decade when Hollywood discovered the blockbuster model: the high-concept film marketed to a mass audience with a single tagline, a recognisable star and a franchise potential. Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) had established the template; E.T., Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun refined it. The decade also produced some of cinema's finest character studies: Scarface (1983), The Shining (1980), Raging Bull (1980), Blade Runner (1982). At 98types Camden, confirmed 1980s film poster products include Scarface, The Terminator, Batman (1989), The Shining and Labyrinth. From £3, buy 3 get 1 free, same-day dispatch from Market Hall, Camden Lock Place, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8AL.

🎥 Scarface (1983) — The Film That Defined a Cultural Aesthetic

Scarface (1983), directed by Brian De Palma and written by Oliver Stone, is one of the most culturally embedded films of the 20th century: a crime epic following Tony Montana (Al Pacino) from Cuban refugee to Miami drug lord. Its three-hour running time, its operatic excess and its quotability — "Say hello to my little friend," "The world is yours," "Every day above ground is a good day" — made it the most-quoted film of the 1980s. The film was critically mixed on release but has been reassessed as a definitive portrait of the Reagan-era American Dream: the immigrant who achieves everything the system promises and is destroyed by it.

The Terminator (1984) — The Film That Made James Cameron

The Terminator (1984), written and directed by James Cameron from a nightmare, was produced for $6.4 million and grossed $78M worldwide — establishing Cameron as a commercially viable director and Arnold Schwarzenegger as a global star. The film's central concept — an AI from the future sends a machine back in time to kill the mother of the resistance leader, while the resistance sends a human soldier to protect her — is the most economically constructed science fiction premise in Hollywood history. "I'll be back" is the most quoted film line of the 1980s.

Batman (1989) — The Film That Proved Superhero Cinema Could Work

Batman (1989), directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson as the Joker, grossed $411M worldwide against a $35M budget and demonstrated definitively that superhero films could be commercially and critically viable. Burton's gothic Gotham City — all expressionist shadows, German Expressionism architecture and Prince music — established the visual register of the dark superhero film that Christopher Nolan later perfected. Jack Nicholson's Joker is the performance against which every subsequent Joker performance has been measured (until Heath Ledger's 2008 iteration).

The Shining (1980) — Kubrick's Horror Masterpiece

The Shining (1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick and adapted from Stephen King's 1977 novel, is the finest horror film ever made — a film that Stephen King himself famously dislikes because Kubrick's version is about something different from what King intended. The Overlook Hotel, Jack Torrance's deterioration, Room 237, the twins in the corridor, "Here's Johnny!" — these are the images that define cinematic horror. The Shining is simultaneously a horror film, a meditation on American history (the hotel built on Native American burial grounds), a study of masculine rage and a film whose meaning has been analysed in Room 237 (2012), a documentary that presents nine different conspiratorial interpretations of Kubrick's intentions.

Labyrinth (1986) — The Cult Fantasy Film

Labyrinth (1986), directed by Jim Henson with production design by Brian Froud and starring David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King and 15-year-old Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, was a commercial disappointment in 1986 (£12.7M against a $25M budget) that has since become one of the most beloved cult films of the decade. Bowie's performance — the tight trousers, the glitter, the impossibly spherical crystal ball manipulation — and the Jim Henson creature work combine to create a fantasy film whose visual imagination has never been replicated. The Labyrinth poster at 98types is the 1980s cult film gift for anyone who named a pet after Bowie's character.