Excellent film. One of the best Sci Fis films around

I thought the original cover art was fine before...

Out of all the criteria you could judge the worthiness of a movie of being viewed by, you choose the cover art? O_o

I rarely think much about a movie's poster, except to say, "Boy, that sure is nice!" But in this case, the original poster is a much more subtle reveal of the movie's plot, is it not? Repeating circles is one interpretation. Another might be that that pattern is often used as a printer test. Yet another, probably unintended one, is that geometric patterns were very much in vogue in the '70's movie posters and Moon is a definite throwback in both tone and presentation to Sci-Fi movies of that period.

I'd say the old poster is quite effective.

PS: I'm glad to see that Duncan Jones has just completed filming on a new Sci-Fi film, Mute, that he helped write. He is developing into a director whose films I very much anticipate, though I did avoid Warcraft.

Just browsing on Netflix or through a database, you look through a LOT of movies and can't "read the back" of the case to see what it is, or a little Netflix blurb doesn't tell you much.

I actually thought it was going to be a documentary by the cover art... maybe something about measuring the "moonquakes" or something... and I'll watch those at night to put me in a calm sleepy mood. Usually documentaries have nice voices and stuff..

Little did I know it ended up being a good sci-fi show :D ....but it didn't get me in a sleepy mood lol

That's funny, I watched this film thanks to the original cover art. The image fascinated me every time I saw it while browsing through films on Netflix, so I eventually decided to watch it... and I'm happy I did, because it's an excellent film!

In my opinion the new cover art looks like a rather boring, generic sci-fi image. It wouldn't have caught my attention.

@Geff said:

Out of all the criteria you could judge the worthiness of a movie of being viewed by, you choose the cover art? O_o

I have to revise my initial reaction. I didn't consider that Netflix nowadays is one of the most prevalent means of movie consumption. As a result, a lot of the time people make decisions based on cover art without doing prior research about other criteria.

I don't watch Netflix myself so I was not considering this aspect. Taking Netflix into account, it doesn't seem that unusual anymore that people would choose to watch a movie based on cover art.

I went to school for graphic design and one of the things they teach us is something like "Americans have access to so much media and a decision is made subconsciously within like, 3.5 seconds on what something is about"... so it applies to things like cereal boxes, MP3 player boxes, movie cases, book art, etc. this is one of those "I see that practice in the real world... with myself!" So it was kind of funny to see something like the cover art detouring or attracting different people?

I have Netflix, but I rarely choose to watch a film based on its cover art. Most of the films in my Netflix watchlist are there because I read/heard about them, because they've been recommended to me by someone or because it's a classic that I haven't seen yet. Sometimes I'll watch a film based on the short description on Netflix, but even then I usually look up some more information about it first.

Caiterz' original post really surprised me though because Moon is actually the only film that I can think of that I watched because of its cover art. I took a Netflix gamble and I'm glad I did :)

The old poster is better. Everyone in the entire universe except the OP knew this.