Despite being mute, static, and one-dimensional, the movie poster manages to inform potential audiences of the rough content of a certain film and with one quick look encourages them to buy the ticket. The poster achieves this by strategically combining verbal and visual design elements. Depending on what film genre it advertises, titles, claims, taglines, release dates, studio logos, symbols, star images, and the like are presented in a particular light, layout, frame, setting, and color.

'Watch It!' discusses the forms and functions of these and other generic verbal and visual movie poster elements. It analyzes ten film genres and their preferred poster design conventions using a corpus of 250 popular movie posters of (mostly) Hollywood films produced between 2010 and 2015.