Drew Struzan, the illustrator whose warm, photorealistic posters helped shape the visual language of modern Hollywood, has died at 78, CBS News reported. For more than five decades his portraits of characters and montage-style compositions graced promotional campaigns for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Blade Runner and dozens of other films, engraving cinematic icons into public memory at a time when a single theatrical poster could change a studio’s fortunes.

Struzan’s work was not merely decoration; it was a performance aid for the movies themselves, translating narrative promise into a single, arresting image. His technique—layered airbrush, gouache and pencil that gave faces an incandescent, almost theatrical glow—created posters that invited audiences into an emotional relationship with characters before a single frame flickered on screen. The result was commercial lift that studios measured in ticket sales and cultural stickiness: his images became synonymous with the films they sold.

In an industry that has traded one-sheet handcraft for data-driven key art, Struzan’s death underscores an ongoing tension. Marketing departments now optimize visuals for streaming thumbnails and social feeds, where test-driven design replaces auteur-driven artwork. Yet demand for Struzan’s originals and limited-edition prints has only intensified, with collectors paying high sums at auction and studios commissioning retro posters to tap nostalgia. “These posters are part of my childhood,” wrote one fan online as tributes poured in, capturing a common sentiment: Struzan’s art was memory-making as much as marketing.

Colleagues and filmmakers frequently described him as a collaborator who understood character psychology. Directors and designers credited his ability to distill narrative into gesture and composition, turning marketing into an extension of storytelling. That commercial-craft bridge helped studios create aspirational publicity that translated to box-office success, particularly in the pre-digital era when a movie’s poster was a primary public touchpoint.

Culturally, Struzan’s oeuvre sits at the intersection of fine art, commerce and fandom. His images have become pilgrimage sites for collectors and museums seeking to preserve the material culture of cinema. The Academy Museum and other institutions have mounted exhibitions that treated posters as artifacts of social history—tangible traces of how communities first encountered movies. In an age of ephemeral streaming, such objects serve as anchors for collective nostalgia and shared experience.

Broader social implications of his passing include questions about craft preservation and labor in creative industries. As studios outsource design to agencies and automate asset generation, the artisanal skills Struzan embodied—hand-eye coordination, tonal control, compositional intuition—risk being devalued. At the same time, the thriving market for physical prints hints at a countervailing trend: consumers proving willing to pay for authenticity and workmanship that digital formats cannot replicate.

Drew Struzan’s posters did more than sell films; they shaped how generations imagined heroes, villains and the spectacle of cinema itself. In the daily churn of branding and content, his work remains a reminder that the human hand can still move audiences in ways an algorithm cannot.