Jonah Hex
The Avengers
Thor
Superman Returns
#3 Intense Weather Setting
This is a bit of an obvious and understandable characteristic. In a lot of superhero movie posters you will see dark skies and intense weather. If the sun was shining and everything was good you wouldn’t need a superhero right? So stormy weather is a great metaphor for darkness, evil, or destruction. It is a completely understandable element to popular superhero posters and works well with the plots of the films.
Hellboy II
Ghost Rider
The Dark Knight Rises
The Amazing Spiderman
#4 Intense Action or Destruction
Lets face it, superheros are strong and they tend to jack things up. So action usually leads to destruction in most superhero movies. So destructive action is quite popular in movie posters for superhero movies. They make to great illustration and design in this type of print design. In a lot of situations you will see dark skies like the posters above with destruction.
Green Lantern
The Avengers
The Incredible Hulk
Punisher
I hope you liked this collection of superhero movie posters. You will see that a few of these posters follow all of the characteristic listed. None-the-less, these design elements were created for a reason to convey certain qualities in each respective film. They each look amazing in their own ways.
Another similarity is that they are all terribly executed in Photoshop for the most part. There are a few exceptions here, like Ghost Rider. Thor and Iron Man 2 are just absolutely horrid.