What happened to movie taglines?

They used to be memorable and quotable. Now they're redundant, wordy, or banal.

Over the weekend I was one of the ticket-buyers who helped make Project Hail Mary the top-grossing film of 2026 so far. The movie is beautiful, strange, ridiculous, and — at 152 minutes — about 25 minutes too long. Ryan Gosling, as accidental astronaut Ryland Grace, is in every scene. That’s right: Hail Mary is full of Grace.

But this isn’t a movie review. It’s a tagline review.

Take a look:

The tagline for Project Hail Mary is “Believe in the Hail Mary.”

The first time I saw this poster outside my neighborhood theater I had no idea what the title meant, what the movie was about, or why the tagline — “Believe in the Hail Mary” — recapitulated the title. I thought Project Hail Mary was a football movie, because 1) Ryan Gosling’s outfit looked to me like a football uniform; 2) my meager lexicon of (American) football includes the term “Hail Mary pass,” which translates to “last-ditch attempt to score”; and 3) I didn’t know the movie was based on a sci-fi book, written by Andy Weir, that is also called Project Hail Mary.

When I finally figured it out it occurred to me that PHM’s wasn’t the first tautological tagline I’d seen. Sinners, originally released in April 2025, also sinned, with a tagline that simply added a few words to the title: “We are all sinners.”¹

Sinners: We are all sinners

Sinners is about music, vampires, and racism, with Michael B. Jordan — who’d go on to win an Oscar for Best Actor — in a double role: That’s his dual photo on the poster. But the tagline doesn’t even hint at any of that. It merely repeats the title and leads you to think this film might be religious propaganda.

And because three examples make a trend, check out the tagline for the forthcoming Spider-Man: A Brand New Day, coming to theaters in late July. It’s “A Brand New Day starts now.” As Miranda Priestly might say with an eyeroll: A brand new day is a brand new day? Groundbreaking.

These examples are depressing but not anomalous. As movies have become louder, flashier, and more expensive, their taglines have atrophied: they’re limp, lackluster, and uninspiring. A crucial bit of copy — one with the potential for lasting memorability and sales power — has been reduced to a bland placeholder.

I’ve written quite a few taglines myself, although not for movies. (But I’m available!) How, I wonder, did we come to this sorry pass?

What is a movie tagline?

A movie tagline is, or ought to be, a brief phrase that gives a sense of a film’s genre, mood, or theme, or even all three. Unlike a logline — a summary of the plot that pitches a screenplay to producers — a tagline is pitched to audiences. The best taglines distill the experience of watching the film: If it’s an action movie, the tagline should get you a little bit fired up. If it’s a comedy, the tag should at least make you smile.

Whoever’s writing taglines for movie studios these days, however, seems to have skipped class during this lesson. They’re writing redundant taglines, as with Project Hail Mary and Sinners — and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, [thanks for the correction, Simon!] The Bride! — that merely reiterate the title’s key word, as though the tagline is an exercise in search-engine optimization.²

Cheap, lazy, profane: “Here comes THE motherf**king BRIDE!”

Or, if they don’t go in for redundancy, they aren’t taglines at all but rather loglines or character intros. See, for example, this year’s Send Help, a movie I happened to like a lot, no thanks to the poster. The combination of grisly image and verbose copy spoils the most delicious aspect of the film: Linda’s transformation from mousy functionary to calculating avenger. The movie deserved a tagline that was shorter, punchier, and slyer, in keeping with the film’s sneaky humor.

Send Help: “Meet Linda Liddle. She’s from Strategy and Planning. She’s the boss now.”

Some taglines are thesis statements in thin disguise. The tagline for the big Oscars winner One Battle After Another comes to mind: “Some search for battle, others are born into it... The last revolution was just the beginning.” Sixteen words! It’s as much of an incoherent mess as the movie itself. (Yes, I’m over here in the minority-opinion corner as usual.)

Another discouraging trend: movie taglines that sound like interchangeable self-help bromides. Consider these undercooked efforts from recent Best Picture nominees:

• Marty Supreme: “Dream big.”

• Bugonia: “It all starts with something magnificent.”

• Hamnet: “Keep your heart open.”³

Standard for LinkedIn profiles and greeting cards. Hackneyed and useless as movie taglines.

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It wasn’t always like this. Taglines used to achieve excellence!

Here’s a little quiz: Guess the movies attached to these famous taglines. If you need answers — I’m guessing you won’t — they’re at the bottom of this post.

1. They’re young, they’re in love, they kill people.

2. In space no one can hear you scream.

3. Love means never having to say you’re sorry.

4. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

5. You’ll never go in the water again!

6. Houston, we have a problem.

7. The mission is a man.

8. Sit back. Relax. Enjoy the fright.

Here’s a hint: None of them was written after 2006.

What makes these older taglines so effective and memorable? Yes, more than half of them talk directly to us, using that magical word you — explicit or implied — to heighten our involvement. But there’s an even more important word at work here. That word is craft. Someone with experience and skill wrote each tagline, employing balance, alliteration, and rhythm to create lines that tease but don’t pester. That foreshadow but don’t spill the beans. That support the title. That complement the images on posters and in ads. That, most important of all, make us want to know more — that motivate us to buy tickets, see the films, and tell our friends about them.

Why are those talents so undervalued — or ignored — in 2026? Are professional writers involved at all in movie-tagline development? Am I yearning for a lost art called writing?

I’m still working on answers to those questions; if you have insights, please share them in a comment.

In the meantime, here are the answers to the tagline quiz:

1. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

2. Alien (1979)

3. Love Story (1970) (not to be confused with the 2026 FX/Hulu series)

4. The Fly (1986)

5. Jaws (1975). The slogan for Jaws 2 (1978) was “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

6. Apollo 13 (1995)

7. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

8. Snakes on a Plane (2006). Great tagline for a not-great movie!

1. Sinners was given a new poster for its re-release during Academy Awards season. This time we see only one Michael B. Jordan — and none of the other characters — with the new tagline “Dance with the devil.” Slightly better, but still opaque and misleading.

2. Reiteration — aka hammering it in — may be the trend here; “phone-distracted viewers” may be the reason. See The New Yorker’s spoof response.

3. I have another complaint about Hamnet, detailed in a Substack Note I published on March 15. It’s my most-viewed Substack post ever. Naturally, it attracted a mansplainer.