One Letter Off Movie Posters (2006)

About

One Letter Off Movie Posters are a series of parody advertisements created by replacing, adding or removing one letter from the original title of the film. In the example above, the official poster for the 2009 film “The Dark Knight” has been altered to “The Dork Knight,” with other miscellaneous elements modified to fit the bastardized title. Instead of the card, batarang, and political button being held in the original poster, the characters are given stereotypically nerdy items: a photo of Leonard McCoy from Star Trek, an Xbox controller, and a Mac logo.

Origin

Editing movie posters has been popular since the early 2000s. In May 2002, SomethingAwful.com posted a Photoshop Phriday challenge in which users were encouraged to edit both titles and images on vintage movie posters.

Fark.com had a movie poster photoshop thread in November 2003. The thread, Mate-a-movie asked users to create posters for movie mashups. Many of the images no longer work, but submissions included “Purple Rain Man,” “A Hard Day’s Nightmare,” and “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Apocalypse Now.”

In February 2005, members of the Whirlpool forums started a thread for users to change the letter in movie titles and then to describe what the movie would be about. The idea came from the SBS Movie Show Forum. The show was cancelled in 2006 and the original thread is gone.
The first post used the example “‘Full Petal Jacket’: The Vietnam War was especially hard on flowers.” No images were made for this thread.

On March 15, 2005, a thread appeared on The Straight Dope message board to encourage people to textually take a letter out of a movie title to make a new one. The firsts post used “How To Make An American Quit,” “Mr. Holland’s Pus,” and “Ill Bill” as examples. No images were posted in this thread, either.

In September 2006, the site Worth1000 held a Photoshop contest similar to the above threads. Entitled One Letter Off, the rules were:

take a popular movie and change one and only one letter of its title. (Change multiple letters, or add or subtract letters, and you risk disqualification.) Then design the poster for the new movie that results. You may want to include the name of the original movie in your comments if you think voters will have trouble identifying it.

It proved to be very popular, more than 100 entries were submitted. Soon after, this type of contest spread to a number of different sites, such as Something Awful.

Spread

This type of contest is still prevalent on Worth1000. Examples of other One Letter Off Photoshop contests include One Letter Off: TV Shows, with 44 entries, and this contest with 100 entries.

On August 1st of 2008, SomethingAwful.com posted the results of a One Letter Off thread as the site’s weekly Photoshop Phriday. That week’s competition involved changing one letter to a movie poster as well as the image. The poster, Josh “Livestock” Buroff noted that “one letter can make a huge difference.” This caused the trend to gain further popularity. More examples of One Letter Off contests can be found at The Chive, Neatorama, GamesRadar, and 2724 diggs.

As a Twitter Trending Topic

While people had been steadily searching for the term since 2006, search popularity spiked in October 2009. That month, "#oneletteroffmovies" was a trending topic on Twitter. Sites including Neatorama, Awards Daily, Mashable and SciFi Wire, of the SyFy channel covered the topic, often posting images of their own. This caused the average number of searches for the term to jump from 23 to 100.