Chiasson, Dan. “’2001: A Space Odyssey’: What It Means, and How It Was Made.” The New Yorker, 16 April 2018.

Kaplan, Mike. “Kubrick: a marketing odyssey.” The Guardian, 2 November 2007.

ONE OF THE RAREST ONE SHEETS FROM THE ICONIC ‘ULTIMATE TRIP’ CAMPAIGN FOR STANLEY KUBRICK’S SCIENCE FICTION MASTERPIECE 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

The Star Child peers out from the center of an psychedelic orange, blue, and white eye—three simple words make up the tagline on this coveted one sheet for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: “the ultimate trip.”

When Kubrick’s 2001 premiered in New York City, a sixth of it’s audience just walked out far before the conclusion of the film’s 142 minutes (Chiasson). A follow-up to his uproariously successful Dr. Strangelove, nobody from Kubrick to the studios could understand why the most expensive movie MGM had ever ma𒆙de to that moment wasn’t hitting its mark with neither critics nor cinephiles nor the general public. There was one key market, however, that would c🌳hange the course of Kubrick’s meditative sci-fi epic permanently.

From the moment 2001 premiered in April 1968, the counterculture was abuzz with its new favorite past-time—imbibe your substance of choice and hunker down in the theater to experience Kubrick’s one-of-a-kind feature. A proto-viral trend, the financial success of 2001 essentially came down to hippies, stoners, and the countercultur꧙e at large.

When Mike Kaplan, the “resident department longhair” in MGM’s publicity department was assign🌺ed the dismal job of explaining to Kubrick how they were going to ‘reconceiv[e] and reposition[n]” the film’s market﷽ing campaign to spin the public disinterest, his own friend group had already “seen” the movie several times (Kaplan). Tense intros aside, Kaplan and Kubrick came to a meeting of the minds and soon would embark on the development process that lead to creation of the film’s updated marketing campaign: “the ultimate trip.”

Moving away from the film’s first, more conventional illustrated posters, the one sheets from the Kaplan campaign utilize edited photography, a psychedelic aesthetic on top of it’s genius use of double entendre. The “ultimate trip” campaign for 2001 is widely considered to be one of the most effective campaigns in the history of film marketing and the present lot—the psyched෴elic eye variation—is one of the raresౠt on the market.