Analysing Taglines for Action Films

Action films usually have taglines which they use throughout their marketing materials, in the trailers, on the posters and in the social media pages (often as hashtags). The tagline should be memorable and its use across the campaign is one way to ensure consistent branding. In this post, I will be looking at many different taglines from films from the action genre, action-comedy genre and other action film hybrids to see what the conventions are and to identify what crops up time and time again. This will help me later on when I have to create a tagline for my film which will be seen on my poster, trailers and my social media pages.

Below is a list of taglines from action film posters (which also featured in the trailers for those films):

'Taken 3'

'Looper'

'The Dark Knight'

'The Matrix'

'The Bourne Supremacy'

 

'Fast X'

'Shadow Force'

'Hypnotic'

'Kill Bill'

'John Wick'

'Elevation'

'Last Seen Alive'

'Baby Driver'

'Extraction'

'Silent Night'

'The Wall'

'Nobody'

'Inception'

'Back in Action'

'Interceptor'

'London Has Fallen'

'Land of Bad'

'Bullet Train'

'Equalizer 2'

'Oblivion'

After looking through the different taglines I have identified the following conventions which often crop up time and time again. These include:

• High-stakes, intense situations ('the world's last defence', 'no man left behind', 'there will be consequences', 'earth is a memory worth fighting for', 'it ends here')
• Personal revenge for the protagonist ('a roaring rampage of revenge', 'he’ll stop at nothing to get her back', 'face your future fight your past', 'they should have left him alone')
• Implying intense action ('don’t go down without a fight', 'prepare for bloody hell', 'never underestimate a nobody', 'action speaks louder than words')
• Recurring theme of running out of time ('the end of the line is just the beginning', 'it ends here', 'the end of the road begins')
• Family/group loyalty ('no man left behind', 'he’ll stop at nothing to get her back','family over everything')
• Powerful punchy titles