An ordinary day can turn into the adventure of a lifetime. And a seemingly sleepy town can suddenly become a thrilling backdrop for a madcap treasure hunt. That’s the feeling you get watching The Goonies, the cult kids’ classic.

Based on a story by Steven Spielberg and directed by Richard Donner, The Goonies first played in American cinemas on 7 June 1985. It fast gained a cult following that endures to this day – and not just with children of the eighties.

While rumours of a long-awaited sequel grow louder by the day, 2025 marks the film’s 40th anniversary. So what better time to tell you about the meticulous making of the Goonies poster used to promote the film in the US and around the world. It’s a masterful piece of work created by renowned movie poster designer Drew Struzan… with a helping hand from Steven Spielberg.

The Goonies poster: conceived by Spielberg, designed by Struzan

The Goonies poster nails the brief, capturing the film’s adventurous spirit with a few strokes of a pencil. We see the young protagonists united in the face of peril: some are confident, others are scared; all are grappling with something bigger than them, knowing they can and must count on their companions to survive. And in the background looms the ancient treasure map behind it all.

The caper begins when young Michael Walsh and his friends find an old Spanish map in his attic. It’s a discovery that reveals the sleepy seaside town to be anything but boring: below its streets lies a pirate galleon and a trove of treasure. The kids have to use all their smarts to find the loot before the fearsome Fratelli gang. And while they’re at it, they must also save their neighbourhood, which is about to be demolished and turned into a golf course.

The idea for the poster came straight from the mind of Steven Spielberg, who wrote the story for The Goonies and executive produced the film. But it’s the little details – the crumbling stalactite, the characters’ concentrated faces, Data’s binoculars tumbling into the abyss – that bring it to life. The man who created the artwork was Drew Struzan, Hollywood’s go-to poster designer in the eighties, with credits including The Thing, Star Wars, the Indiana Jones franchise [read our article on Indy here] and Back to the Future [whose iconic posters we talked about here].

Struzan drew all his posters by hand in a painstaking creative process that involved producing dozens of drafts and alternative images. His human touch might seem quaint or downright primitive in the digital era. Yet the story of how the Goonies poster was made can teach us valuable lessons about creativity that are still relevant in today.

The story behind the Goonies poster

Struzan was renowned for the human touch he brought to his work – and had strong opinions on the use of computers in graphic design. As he once explained to an interviewer:

“I don’t mind computers as a tool but it’s a shame it has not only changed the feeling of the world but also the industry. There’s a lack of the handmade human touch that people enjoy. That motivates, inspires, and transcends the page and becomes a part of people’s lives.”

All of Struzan’s ingenuity went into making the Goonies poster. As he revealed in this interview, to get the composition right, he had to improvise: he climbed up to the second floor of his house and asked his son and friends to pose in the garden below while he leaned over the balcony and photographed them from above.

So the figures we see on the movie poster are actually kids from Struzan’s neighbourhood who, just for one day, got to experience their own Goonies-style adventure.

Fun fact: when they saw the original poster, the young actors complained that only Brand was front and centre, while the rest of the characters got smaller and smaller. So Spielberg asked the Struzan to draw seven different versions of the scene, changing the order of the characters each time so that each cast member had their moment in the limelight.

Then, Spielberg – renowned for his ability to bond with young actors – devised a marketing stunt to keep them happy: in the week of the film’s release, American newspapers ran a series of ads for The Goonies, each spotlighting a different character from the movie.

Despite these demands, Struzan had a hoot creating the promotional art for The Goonies. Of course, it helped that he had a clear concept from the outset.

The rare alternative Goonies posters

Struzan’s poster was so on the money that it was used to promote the film pretty much everywhere, both inside and outside the United States. Still,  a handful of alternative posters for The Goonies were also made  and a couple deserve a special mention.

The Japanese poster for The Goonies uses an illustration by Noriyoshi Ohrai, the man who designed the international poster for The Empire Strikes Back, the second instalment of the original Star Wars trilogy, not to mention a slew of Godzilla posters [you can find our selection of the best posters for the Japanese monster movie franchise here]

Noriyoshi Ohrai’s poster has something delightfully phantasmagorical about it that isn’t found in the American original. Another superb  alternative Goonies poster is John Alvin’s design. Alvin was also a hitter in the movie poster world, and on this blog we’ve previously admired his memorable minimalist poster for Jurassic Park [you can read our piece on Jurassic Park posters here].

John Alvin’s Goonies poster. Image: filmartgallery.com

In Alvin’s alternative artwork, the famous treasure map appears in the foreground, with a tear framing the characters’ silhouettes in the background. At the top, the tagline beckons us to “Join the adventure”…

What do you think the poster for the Goonies sequel will look like? Will it keep Struzan’s human touch, or will the studio try something completely different?