GIFs have taken over the Web and now they might take over movie posters too.
The new sci-fi action movie “Looper,” written and directed by Rian Johnson, very well might be the first movie to roll out an “official” GIF movie poster in the hopes of getting tweeted, reblogged and shared all over the Web.
Photographer and founder of startup Actioner Ronen Verbit was behind the GIF posters. Verbit and his team at Actioner made two different Looper GIF posters. The first one was a cinemagraph-style image based on the print movie poster, and the second one was made as a Tumblr Photoset from hand-painted animations by Zachary Johnson. According to Verbit, the two GIF “Looper” posters were the two most shared posts on Looper’s Tumblr blog.
“Rian and I were talking about posters, and it just seemed silly to wait a year for someone else to remix an animated GIF from the DVD,” explained Verbit. “Why not just make Internet-native viral art for the movie directly?”
GIFs are the Web artifact that just won’t go away, and over the past couple of years GIFs have really enjoyed a revival online. While fans constantly create GIFs using images and video clips from their favorite TV shows and movies, the GIF “Looper” posters are the first ones to have been made for advertising purposes.
“Initially, people were using the Internet to share media made for other formats,” explained Verbit. “Once we had a generation that grew up online, we began making media and art specifically for the internet. GIFs are the new medium of our generation.”
More in Media
Yahoo takes cues from platforms as it offers more editorial control to creators
Through its creator program, Yahoo is evolving from its roots as a content aggregator and editorial publisher to more of a distribution platform for individual creators.
Podcast companies turn to live events to capture growing advertiser spend
The surge in the number of live podcast events in 2025 reflects a broader shift: advertisers are betting bigger on podcasts — not just as an audio channel but as a full-fledged creator economy play.
Media Briefing: ‘Cloudflare is locking the door’: Publishers celebrate victory against AI bot crawlers
After years of miserably watching their content get ransacked for free by millions of unidentified AI bot crawlers, publishers were finally thrown a viable lifeline.