How The 40-Year-Old Virgin became Hollywood's last great comedy poster

If you don’t use it, you lose it, and Hollywood has been using The 40-Year-Old Virgin poster for nearly 20 years. You know the one: Steve Carell in front of a glowing orange sun with his eyes staring off in the distance like he’s having his high school yearbook picture taken. From small productions that could use more creative marketing to Kevin Hart vehicles for Netflix that should have more creative marketing, the poster’s DNA remains a fixture of movie publicity. Most recently, Pamela Adlon’s 2024 comedy Babes features a poster straight out of the mid aughts, capturing what looks like photoshopped images of its stars over basically the same background. It’s as if there’s no other way to market these comedies.

When it emerged in 2005, 40-Year-Old Virgin and its poster were quietly revolutionary. It was a different time. Three comedies were among the highest-grossing movies of the year: Wedding Crashers, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Hitch. They all had the same basic poster: the lead actors posing in front of a white background, with their whole bodies in the frame, staring directly down the camera. These comedies sold themselves on the very thing 40-Year-Old Virgin lacked: star power.

“Judd Apatow was unknown,” said Maria Pekurovskaya, an executive vice president of creative marketing at Universal Pictures. Pekurovskaya spearheaded the risky campaign. She was a fan of The Larry Sanders Show and Freaks And Geeks, but “the world had no concept of Judd” and, aside from The Daily Show, which was “pretty niche,” Carell was “completely unknown” to the broader culture.

Photo: Universal Studios

Furthermore, 40-Year-Old Virgin was a different kind of R-rated comedy. Carell’s character, Andy, was a sweeter manchild than those found in the film’s comedic contemporaries. He wasn’t one of the sinister horndogs from Wedding Crashers or a volatile loose canon like Adam Sandler. Apatow’s movie was softer, more gentle, and sensitive. Carell had an innocence to match, which the poster needed to capture.

“It all stemmed from high school yearbooks,” said Damon Wolf, founder of Crew Creative, the firm hired to market the movie. “[Andy] wasn’t in high school, but he might as well have been.” To Wolf, yearbook photos captured what the movie was about: “You’re feeling your most confident, yet you’re your most innocent. You’re feeling cool, yet we’re all freaks and geeks.”

Though yearbook parodies are now common in our irony-pilled society, in 2005, it was a novel approach. Apatow had used yearbook photos to great effect in the opening credits to Freaks And Geeks and it would still be another few years before Awkward Family Photos inundated the internet with their embarrassing portraits. For reference, the poster’s photographer Art Streiber told The A.V. Club he was given a curiously strong collection of Altoids ads, with taglines like “Soon, your Altoids will blossom” and “It’s normal for your Altoids to change” for inspiration.

But puberty jokes alone do not sell a movie. After all, Andy wasn’t going through adolescence, but breaking from social anxiety and routine. There was some hope mixed with shame in his expression, while his childish wardrobe and hair hinted at an arrested development. He just couldn’t look depressed.

“When we started shooting, his expression was very sad,” said Pekurovskaya. “I remember asking him to give a face that was more hopeful.” Pekurovskaya recalls telling Carell to imagine what it would look like if he thought “the next woman that came through the door could, potentially, be it—you could no longer be a virgin.”

“He gave me a smile that was so specific, and in that moment I remember just going, ‘Oh, there’s the poster.’ Like, done.”

It’s an experience that has never happened again. Pekurovskaya was so bullish on the poster that it was the only option she presented to Apatow. “Normally, you’ll present 20 different comps,” she said. “I presented one and it was blown up to poster size, which you never do—you always show smaller. I remember saying to him, if this is not the poster, I don’t know what to do with myself. I remember turning the poster around, and he burst out laughing. It’s not easy to make Judd laugh. He just went ‘done.’ I don’t think I ever showed him the other ones.”

The response to the poster was equally uncommon. When Carell appeared on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno to promote the film, Leno asked what psychological effects seeing the poster “all over town” had on Carell’s children. The photo of Carell had definitely unlocked something. Pekurovskaya remembers reading comments on movie sites like Yahoo Movies, where theater workers were hyping up the poster.

“It was the first time in a long time that any of us said ‘this movie poster is selling this movie,'” said Wolf.

Seizing on the strong branding from Apatow’s first film, the same team used similar elements for Apatow’s follow-up, Knocked Up. It wasn’t the main poster, but it shared enough elements to link The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Apatow’s other projects.

The Apatow-produced Step Brothers went full-on yearbook photo, as did The Rocker, which Apatow didn’t produce but starred Carell’s Office-mate Rainn Wilson and Anchorman star Christina Applegate. The format followed Rogen through the 2010s, with a 40-Year-Old Virgin-esque poster for his animated movie Sausage Party. Anything remotely associated with “The Guys Who Brought You The 40-Year-Old Virgin” was signed up for a yearbook photo.

Comedies farther from Apatow’s orbit borrowed the design, too. Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film The Informant! might be the most glaring example. On television, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia sold two seasons using the format. Even superhero movies got in the action, with Deadpool sitting for a portrait.

“Homage is a part of flattery, but then it became a design technique as opposed to the initial concept,” said Wolf. “I think that is just lazy design. I say that having done posters that mimic The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

Today, the format still appears in two places: low-budget comedies and star-studded Netflix event movies. The poster makes a lot of sense for Babes, considering that the trailer advertises a raunchy R-rated comedy with heart, the kind for which Apatow is known. But when it’s being recreated for movies starring Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg, it feels like we’re stuck in a creative cul-de-sac.

Photo: Neon

“You can force it in, and it’ll fit, and it’ll be okay,” said Wolf, “but when you get that perfect square in that perfect square, that’s because people were sitting and thinking about what the essence of the film is, presenting it to the filmmakers and asking, ‘Do we all agree this is the essence of the film?'”

We keep using The 40-Year-Old Virgin poster because it’s a simple and effective way to put the vital information first. The characters and title are right in front of the viewer. “By and large, it’s created and meant to be read at 35 miles an hour,” Adam Fogelson, then-president of marketing at Universal, told The New York Times in 2005. “Our best hope is that people can perceive the title, and hopefully the date.” Those principles remain the same, except now they’re flying by as thumbnails on a streaming service, for which the poster appears tailor-made.

The success and originality behind the poster are rarities in today’s landscape, where budgets and schedules usually affect marketing first. Because of tight shoots, stars often don’t get booked for marketing photoshoots, and creative teams work off of on-set photography. The question “Why don’t they make comedies anymore?” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when the comedies that do get produced are sold with hand-me-down marketing materials.

“It all goes hand-in-hand because if you spend $100 million on a movie and you’re slapped with some unit photography because a so-and-so actor can’t sit down for a photoshoot,” says Wolf. “That’s not anyone’s fault but the process.”

The 40-Year-Old Virgin poster remains one of the best of the last few decades, but its impact has been dulled by overuse. Even worse, the allure of what’s worked in the past has made comedy easy to ignore. Audiences know what to expect from a movie using the poster, and after 20 years of watching The 40-Year-Old Virgin at home, they’re more than willing to watch No Hard Feelings there, too. (For the record, No Hard Feelings also used a variation). If we ever expect R-rated studio comedies to return in full force, studios need to show audiences something fresh on the screen and on billboards—not the same old yearbook photos.

“I love a great R-rated comedy. It’s one of my favorite genres to see in a theater,” Pekurovskaya said. “I talk all the time here about how sad I am that it feels like they’re not being made anymore, but I do have hopes that they will be made at the volume that they were in their heyday. It does feel like someone just has to make a great one, honestly, and then the comedy will make a comeback. It’s a cyclical business.”