There’s a specific quality to the first official teaser poster for 2011’s The Muppets that, fifteen years on, still does something to you when you encounter it in the wild. Maybe you saw it stapled to a Montreal bus shelter in May of that year, which is where it was first spotted in the wild. Maybe you saw it later, framed on the wall of a basement room belonging to a former roommate. Maybe — and this is the most common — you encountered it in the way most Americans encountered it, which is to say through a fan blog or a film news site like SlashFilm or Ain’t It Cool News, where it broke in mid-May 2011 and immediately did something to the back of everyone’s brain.
The tagline: They’re closer than you think.
Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, and Animal, walking out of a foggy, lit-from-above void as if emerging from a soft-focus dream. No Jason Segel. No Amy Adams. No Walter. No title beyond a small green “M” logo in the corner. Just five felt figures and a sentence designed to evoke either nostalgia or a slow approaching dread, depending on the mood you brought to it.
We love the Muppets. The Muppets are one of the great American cultural creations of the past century. And the poster is still, somehow, creepy.
The campaign that came after was, somehow, even smarter
To understand why the teaser landed the way it did, you have to remember the conditions of the Muppets’ cultural footing in spring 2011. Disney had owned the characters since the Eisner-era purchase from The Jim Henson Company, which was announced February 17, 2004, and in the seven years since had done basically nothing memorable with them. The 1999 Muppets from Space had been the last theatrical outing. The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005) and the various direct-to-video and TV special projects in between hadn’t moved the cultural needle. By 2011, an entire generation of children had grown up with the Muppets as their parents’ nostalgia rather than as a living franchise.
Jason Segel, the How I Met Your Mother and Forgetting Sarah Marshall star and an avowed lifelong Muppets fan, had spent years lobbying Disney to let him write a new Muppets movie. He eventually got there, with co-writer Nicholas Stoller, and the film — directed by James Bobin of Flight of the Conchords — was set for a November 23, 2011 Thanksgiving release. The marketing problem was: How do you reintroduce the Muppets to a culture that had largely moved on?
Disney’s answer was the most committed bit of parody marketing any studio has run this century. The teaser trailer — released in front of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in May 2011 — pretended to be a romantic comedy called Green With Envy before revealing itself as a Muppets movie. Subsequent trailers parodied The Hangover Part II, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher’s industrial-noir promo template was a particular target), and, in a moment of recursive brilliance, parodied the Green With Envy trailer itself. The campaign produced parody posters mimicking The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Green Lantern, Captain America: The First Avenger, and seemingly every other big release of that fall.
But the They’re Closer Than You Think teaser came first. And the first move in a campaign tells you what the campaign thinks the audience needs.
What the teaser was actually doing
The reason the Closer Than You Think poster feels strange — even now, even as a Muppets fan, even staring at it knowing you love these characters — is that it’s borrowing the visual grammar of horror movie teasers and applying it to children’s entertainment. The minimal cast lineup. The unlit faces emerging from soft white space. The cryptic tagline that promises an unspecified arrival. The absence of any of the human stars who would be in the movie. The Muppet Mindset blog, which covered the poster the day after its leak, noted approvingly that “no Jason Segel, no Amy Adams, no Walter… it’s the Muppets.” That was the whole point. The poster was a deliberate stripping-away of every framing element a 2011 audience might use to contextualize the Muppets as a kids’ brand. What was left was the threat of the Muppets’ presence — a felt-and-foam phantom slowly walking toward you from the corner of the parking lot.
Which is, when you actually think about it, the entire experience of being a Muppets fan in 2011. The characters had been gone long enough that their return felt uncanny. They were closer than you thought. They were, in fact, six months away.
The marketing was credited as some of the best of the year by trade press at the time. Indiewire, in a November 2011 piece comparing the Muppets campaign to David Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo rollout (handled in part by designer Neil Kellerhouse), declared the Muppets the clear winner of an unofficial Best Marketing Campaign award that doesn’t actually exist. The poster work was credited to Disney’s in-house marketing team, working with a constellation of agency partners — the kind of campaign that, in the modern era of streaming-first releases and algorithmically-driven trailer placement, would be very hard to replicate. The conditions that made it possible — a theatrical release with a six-month runway, a culture that still encountered movie posters as physical objects on bus shelters and movie theater walls, and an audience that still gathered around shared trailers in cinemas — barely exist anymore.
What it was up to, in retrospect
The They’re Closer Than You Think poster wasn’t trying to sell The Muppets as a movie. It was trying to sell the idea that the Muppets were back, before anyone knew what “back” was going to look like. It traded specificity for atmosphere. It made the audience do the work of imagining what was coming. It worked.
The movie itself — released that Thanksgiving — went on to gross approximately $171.8 million worldwide on a $45 million budget, earn an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Man or Muppet,” and reintroduce the Muppets to a generation of kids who had not previously known them. The 2014 follow-up Muppets Most Wanted, also directed by Bobin, performed less well, and the Muppets’ subsequent decade has been a series of middling Disney+ projects and short series. The 2011 campaign remains, in retrospect, the high-water mark of recent Muppets marketing.
But the poster. The poster, with its quiet single-light tableau and the five felt figures slowly arriving from somewhere out of frame, is the part that has lasted. They were closer than you thought in 2011. They are, in the way these things go, still closer than you think.
You just have to know where to look.
