Like most 90s era films, the marketing departments at Morgan Creek & Warner Brothers working on The Crush tended to focus on one specific set of imagery from the film, namely the one-sheet poster. Every instance we were able to find had the classic high contrast image of Alicia Silverstone’s face with Cary Elwes reflected in her Lolita-esque sunglasses. So there isn’t much variation in the following examples, but we thought it would be fun to share these from multiple papers back in 1993.
First up, let’s take a gander at one of the earliest ads for the film we could find, this one was ran in a southern Illinois university paper called The Daily Egyptian. Typically we like to kick these off with the large format New York Times ads, but since this one ran in the Thursday April 1st, 1993 edition it predates the Times ad which follows…
Here is the first ad taken from the New York Times back on April, 2nd of 93, the opening day for the film.
This next piece is the second week follow-up advertisement that added some small quotes from critics. While Jim Svejda was going “full alliteration”, whoever was reviewing the film at the New York Daily News must have busted out their thesaurus when they evoked the term “suspenser.” I’ll be honest, I wasn’t convinced that it was a real word until I looked it up and realized that the term came out of the 60s and the birth of creative film criticism.
Though again, it’s using the same imagery, I wanted to share this ad that ran in the Ocala Star Banner on April 2nd of ’93 because I love it when they run copy that features the ticket prices. Damn, remember when you could catch a matinee for $3.50?! No wonder I saw so many flicks in the theater in the 90s…
This ad from the Lakeland Ledger that also ran on opening that on that April 2nd, features a slightly different orientation of the one-sheep poster for the film, similar to the ad above.
Here’s the second to last one we were able to source which came from the Desert News on April 10th, the second Saturday of the film’s run in theaters.
And finally, here’s another piece from the New Times, this one ran on the last weekend that the flick was advertised in the paper back on April 23rd, 1993.
