The next installment of the venerable Scream franchise will be hitting the silver screen soon, and a new poster promoting it was released on January 1. Seeing as the movie is set in New York and the first trailer has shown that the subway plays a part in the plot, it almost seems inevitable that the poster would riff on a subway map theme. Here, each route line corresponds to a movie, with Line 6 – the upcoming film – cleverly shown as being “under construction”. Altogether, the lines form a rough outline of the famous “Ghost Face” mask.

I haven’t paid that much attention to the franchise since I saw the first one way back in 1996, but I believe that the “station” names on each line correspond to who dies in each movie, though fans are picking through it in much finer detail than I care to. One thing this means is that this actually isn’t a very good subway map, as there’s very little interchange between lines: once you’re dead in one movie, you’re not coming back in the next one (or are you?). Some New York subway map purists are also taking the poster to task for playing fast and loose with the line colours – to them, the 1, 2 and 3 should all be red, and the 4, 5 and 6 should all be green. However, that would make a pretty dull poster!

However, the main talking point here isn’t the poster itself, but its perceived similarity to a fan-made poster by Gil Marcel, first posted to his Instagram account on December 3, 2022 – just under a month before the official poster was released.

Like the official poster, Gil’s assigns a line to each movie, but defines the “Ghost Face” more with geographical features than the lines themselves. As a result, his design perhaps evokes the actual New York subway map more than the official poster, which seems a little more generic.

It’s had a lot of people crying plagiarism and theft of design (though Gil himself is being more diplomatic), but I’m not entirely convinced. First off – given the movie’s location and plot, this basic concept is almost guaranteed to be one of the first things that any graphic designer worth their salt would think of. It’s almost a no brainer, and many art directors that I’ve worked under would dismiss it as being “too obvious”, wanting me to push harder for a more original idea. To my mind, it’s entirely plausible that these two concepts were arrived at independently of each other.

Secondly, the gap of a a month between Gil first posting his concept and the official poster being released isn’t necessarily as damning as it looks. It’s very possible that the official poster started development long before December 3, but had to cycle through multiple iterations and approvals before being released – things don’t always move fast when there’s multiple stakeholders in play.

So what do you think? Coincidence or plagiarism? Which one is the better executed? Is it even a good concept to begin with?

Sources: Scream/Twitter and Gil Marcel/Instagram