Every Kick-Ass Trailer and Poster, in One Place: Or, History of a Publicity Onslaught

Kick-Ass hits theaters on April 16th, and we say thank goodness — not only because we want to check it out, but also because that will presumably staunch the endless flow of Kick-Ass promotional materials, which seemingly TKTK.

Anyway! Geek blogs being geek blogs, these things tend to come in OMG-OMG-OMG succession, leaving you out of luck if you want to swim against the hypestream and just look at the things. Luckily, Geekosystem is here to play your Maxwell’s Demon and stack ’em all up in one place. In the process, we think you’ll agree that the Kick-Ass publicity blitzkrieg is no joke.

Click on the dates to see sources, which were the earliest recorded instances I could find of their being written about. Let me know in the comments if I’ve missed anything.

Kick-Ass Trailers:

The first teaser trailer: 11/10/09.

The second (SFW) teaser trailer: 1/8/10.

The fourth Kick-Ass trailer (especially profane). 2/18/10.

The fifth Kick-Ass trailer: this is just getting ridiculous. 3/18/10.

Bonus: the trailer for Kick-Ass: the Game. 3/23/10.

Whew.

Kick-Ass Posters:

Hoo boy. The first we could find was this John Romita, Jr.-illustrated poster from Comic-Con: 7/17/09.

The next wave: the first four official posters. (via IGN: click to see their large versions.) 11/05/09.

Then: a new poster of Kick-Ass. 11/11/09.

Then: another new poster, feat. Red Mist. 12/4/09.

Then: Nic Cage’s Big Daddy. 12/14/09.

Then! Hit-Girl. 12/17/09. click to enlarge.

A whole month without a poster? You guys are slackin’! This is the final theatrical trailer, although… 1/17/10.

Oh, this one’s in the UK. Okay. 2/2/10.

This one is also new and from the UK. Well what do you know. 2/15/10.

*N.B.: Filmofilia has some character posters dated 2/21/10, but we get malware alerts when we try to go there; we’re not adding them here, but Latino Review‘s got more info.

And then, there were the Kick-Ass propaganda posters. These first debuted at SXSW; let’s call ’em 3/12/10.

To wit: that’s six trailer releases (including the game trailer), and eleven poster releases (clumping the first four posters and the three SXSW posters into one entity each, and giving the Filmofilia posters credit).

To recap:

Trailer dates (as early as we could find them):

• 11/10/09
• 1/18/10
• 2/2/10
• 2/18/10
• 3/18/10
• 2/23/10 [game trailer]

Poster dates:

• 7/17/09
• 11/05/09
• 11/11/09
• 12/4/09
• 12/14/09
• 12/17/09
• 1/17/10
• 2/2/10
• 2/15/10
• 2/21/10 [can’t be seen above for reasons described]
• 3/12/10

The notion that Kick-Ass is hyperpublicized: Definitely not a myth.

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