Most old movie posters aren’t worth a fortune. One collector guide puts typical prices somewhere between twenty and two hundred dollars, with rarity, artwork, size and condition driving the price up from there. A few posters, though, have sold for sums that look more like fine art prices than souvenir money.
The four below are the ones that keep showing up in auction records and collector lists. Each has a documented sale behind it, and each belongs to a small group of designs people have spent decades hunting for.
Metropolis (1927)
Fritz Lang’s silent science fiction film produced the most expensive movie poster on record. A Metropolis poster from Reel Poster Gallery in London fetched $690,000 on 15 November 2005. German painter Heinz Schulz-Neudamm created the design. Recent roundups still list that sale as the top price.
Scarcity is a big part of the story. Only four copies of the original international version are known to exist. Two are held by MoMA and the Austrian National Library Museum in Vienna. The record poster changed hands again in 2012, when a court ordered auction sold it in a group lot for $1.2 million.
The Mummy (1932)
This Universal horror poster held the world record before Metropolis overtook it. The most expensive US one sheet is the one for The Mummy. It set a record at Sotheby’s in 1997. Sources disagree slightly on the price, with most citing $435,500 and some listing about $453,500 or $452,000.
The artwork helps explain the demand. Illustrator Karoly Grosz drew posters for several early Universal monster films, The Mummy among them. The film itself cost only about $196,000 to make at the time, which makes the poster’s later price all the more striking.
Frankenstein (1931)
Frankenstein is among the most famous monster movies ever made. Even so, posters for it have always been hard to find. The best known sale involved a Style C three sheet, a large poster measuring 41 by 78.5 inches.
Heritage Auctions sold it on March 28, 2015, for $358,500, a record for any Frankenstein promotional print. Grosz illustrated posters for Frankenstein and The Mummy, and both have set auction records for the world’s most expensive film poster. Because the Frankenstein material is so scarce, any surviving piece from the 1931 release gets a close look.
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Posters for the sequel are another cornerstone of horror collecting. A rare Style D poster had previously only been seen in the film’s pressbook before one surfaced. That poster sold at a Heritage auction in November 2007 for $334,600.
The sale set a world record, which was later tied by The Black Cat in 2009. Heritage sold both posters for the same amount, $334,600. The pattern is a familiar one: a design that hardly anyone knew still existed turns up, and collectors compete hard for it.
