We recently reported that the rarest movie poster in existence, an original Metropolis from 1927, is going up for sale and could fetch $850,000.
Now more rare genre movie posters have been unearthed, and they should generate mega-bucks for the collector who can afford such great cinematic rarities.
We all probably have the fantasy of finding something incredibly valuable in the attic, and that’s just what happened with this clutch of posters.
According to Foxnews.com, they were all stuck together and hidden in an attic for eighty years. The posters – which were carefully pulled apart – sold for $30,000 at an auction before they were consigned to Heritage Auctions in Dallas.
Once Heritage saw what they had, meaning, they hit the classic movie motherlode, and considering as Grey Smith of Heritage Auctions said, “The colors had not seen the light of day in 80 years,” they looked very good. (There was some touch up work, and some were restored on linen, which is done a lot with old posters so they don’t totally crumble).
The posters include the ultra rare Bela Lugosi Dracula, which will have a starting bid of $200,000, The Maltese Falcon, Public Enemy with James Cagney, and more. The reason the posters were glued together because when a new movie came to town, you glued the new poster on top of the old one, making a nice stack of rarities that could thankfully be pulled apart years later. And back during the depression, no one thought movie posters would ever be valuable like they are today, and certainly not at these prices.
In honor of this great discovery, Vanity Fair also posted a list of very valuable posters, including the 1925 Phantom of the Opera, which went for $155,350, a 1931 Frankenstein, which went for $189,750 in 2004, the 1933 King Kong, which sold at Sotheby’s for $244,500, the aforementioned Dracula, which Nicholas Cage sold for $310,000, The Bride of Frankenstein, which went for $334,600, The Mummy, which was the record that anyone paid for a poster, $452,000, before Metropolis broke the record, going for a cool $690,000.
