Legendary Hollywood poster artist Drew Struzan dies aged 78: Here's 10 of his most iconic works

Hollywood legend Drew Struzan has died, aged 78. And if his name is not familiar to you, his work almost certainly will be.

Since the mid-70s he created genre-defining movie posters and illustrations, the images that attracted millions to many of the biggest films of the 1980s and 1990s. Including those from the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series.

We’ve picked 10 of what we think are the most iconic of Drew Struzan’s works. But we had a hard job cutting these down from an even more expansive long list.

If any of these make you want to learn more, check out Drew: The Man Behind the Poster, a documentary about the great man’s life, from 2013. It’s available to watch now through Prime Video.

To our eyeballs, this is the most iconic poster of Struzan’s career. And in good horror movie fashion, it doesn’t reveal the monster at the film’s core. It apparently only took Struzan a handful of hours to come up with the design, and the brief gave the artist very little to work with. The result? An indelible piece of cinema history.

The film itself may have been maligned by many, and is famously one director Stephen Spielberg does’t revisit. But the poster? It’s seared into the minds of countless millennials, and sums up the often under-appreciated magic of a film that has a special place in the hearts of those who grew up with it.

A poster that helps sum up the film while working as a smart piece of marketing back at its release in 1988. This was the era when Eddie Murphy was at the height of his box office powers, after the hot streak of Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop (err, and The Golden Child). The figurative juxtaposition that is the movie’s whole conceit is right in there too. Genius.

The blueprint for the Back to the Future series of movie posters began here, with an image just brimming with excitement for the concept of the film. Its sequel traded fire for electricity, foregrounding the events of the movie itself. And of course the third movie’s poster appends those old west costumes.

Does this poster really tell you much about what Risky Business is about? Not really. But what a striking image. Following the film’s release the sales of Ray-Ban Wayfarers reportedly skyrocketed. And we like to think the poster, as well as the film itself, had a hand in that.

This poster for the The Goonies is emblematic of how Struzan’s process could bring out the fantastical adventure elements of Hollywood’s 1980s blockbusters. He would often work from photos, adapting them into drawn sketches that let him play with scale and perspective for a much larger-than-life impact than a single frame of the finished film could ever hope to achieve. There are multiple variants of this poster too — each with a different Goonie taking the lead.

Another poster made memorable by the sheer strength of the image, An American Tale’s depicts Fievel looking thoroughly out of place beside the much more realistic depictions of humans’ shoes, to a background of lifelike steam boats. The poster for sequel Fievel Goes West by Tom Martin is, while perfectly serviceable, not a patch on this classic.

In a rare moment of Struzan not making the movie posters of our childhoods, we reckon Tom Chantrell’s poster design might snag it for the original Star Wars: A New Hope. But those who grew up with the prequel trilogy will have this The Phantom Menace promo art stamped upon their brains. It’s a classic character composite, rendered beautifully in Struzan’s signature style.

This 90s slice of pulpy dark comedy tends to get advertised with a much more cheesy… much more 90s photo-based image these days. But the original one-sheet for the cinematic release shows what a master Struzan was at creating realistic-looking likenesses of a film’s characters even when they only took up a small part of the poster itself.

Drew Struzan did not actually make the most badass of the Indiana Jones posters. That accolade goes to Bruce Wolfe’s Temple of Doom poster, which makes it look a bit like you’re about to watch a violent gore-fest. But the icon of the series? Struzan’s poster for the original Raiders of The Lost Ark, which — as ever — just captures the actual vibes of the film perfectly.

• The coolest movies of all time