We can all accept that the golden age of movie posters is over. The legendary work of the likes of Drew Struzan or Renato Casaro has now been replaced with (for the most part) “that’ll do” Photoshop. While the craft of making an iconic film poster might be in decline, a poster’s primary function remains the same: to quickly convey who is in it and give audiences an instant idea of what to expect.
Earlier this year, Jason Statham scored a big hit with The Beekeeper, partly due to its premise and primarily due to a lack of other releases in cinemas. The Beekeeper is a typically OTT yet enjoyably daft beat-em-up, which also answers the question of what a fight between Jason Statham and Jeremy Irons would look like. Spoiler alert, brief.
Stath stars as the titular Beekeeper, a former operative in a secret organisation called (you guessed it) Beekeepers. Now retired, the former Beekeeper has taken the title of his former vocation quite literally as he now (you guessed it) is a keeper of Bees. He is forced to take up his old mantle of Beekeeper (the other form of non-bee-based Beekeepering) after his elderly neighbour is the victim of a scam that sees her life savings and all the money for a charity she worked for stolen in moments. After she takes her own life, Stath springs into action to shut down the scammers’ operations, breaks many many bones, smashes faces, and starts the odd fire. The mere presence of Jason Statham in a movie implies all these things; we only need to see his face on a poster to know what we’ll get.
However, the poster for The Beekeeper suggested there could be a fun spin on the average Statham offering and, in my opinion, a better movie than the one we got. Vengeance Has A Sting or Expose The Corruption/Protect The Hive screams the tagline with an image of Jason Statham seemingly made out of Bees. See for yourself below.
Now that’s not a man covered in bees, that’s a man MADE of bees!
At first glance, this poster suggests that a hive of Bees has taken the form of Statham and is going out into the world to dispense justice and only communicating through bee-based analogies. At the very least, it implies that Stath has somehow harnessed the power to turn himself into thousands of bees at will, perhaps due to a science experiment gone wrong. The Stath, starring as Dr Ben Keeper, is close to a breakthrough in his bee-based experiments, but when his project gets shut down, he’s forced to use his untested serum on himself, allowing him to turn in thousands of bees whenever he sees injustice. Everything about that sounds terrible, but ask yourself this: have you ever seen that movie before? There’s a solid case to be made for nobody wanting that to exist, but a movie where Jason Statham transforms into bees, each bee with a little Jason Statham face. Honestly, I didn’t know I wanted to see a film about Jason Statham made of bees until I saw the poster, and now it has become the only motion picture I want to see.
One day, Hollywood will have the courage to make a movie about a person who has the power to turn into thousands of bees or thousands of bees with the ability to form the shape of a man. Until then, we can only hope The Beekeeper 2 leans more into the woefully untapped creative goldmine of bees, taking the form of Jason Statham to fight crime.
