Flavorwire

Earlier this week, we spotted the first poster for the upcoming (and much anticipated, at least by us) film adaptation of David Mitchell’s stupendous novel Cloud Atlas, and it seemed very familiar — sort of like a combination of the book’s US and UK covers, all glossed over in sepia. Curious, we spent a little time comparing other book covers with the posters of their film adaptations to see which movies maintained the mood of the book’s original cover, which twisted it around completely, and which became more iconic than the original covers. Click through to read through our findings, and let us know if you have any insights of your own on this topic in the comments.

Cloud Atlas

As we pointed out above, this poster — while beautiful — looks like it took its bottom half from the UK cover (inverted, obviously), its top half from the first panel of the US cover, and added a figure in the middle to remind us that Tom Hanks is in this movie. That said, we actually think that the film poster reflects the mood of the novel better than either cover alone — the story is an elegant mash-up job, so why shouldn’t the poster follow suit?