This Movie Poster May Be Worth $1 Million

This poster for Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis set a record for the most expensive movie poster in the world when its owner paid $690,00 for it in 2005, but it's been repossessed, and some experts think that in the upcoming auction, it might fetch over $1 million.

This poster for Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis set a record for the most expensive movie poster in the world when its owner paid $690,00 for it in 2005, but it's been repossessed, and some experts think that in the upcoming auction, it might fetch over $1 million. There are only four known surviving copies of the poster, reports The Hollywood Reporter's Andy Lewis, and the other three are in the hands of the Museum of Modern Art, the Austrian National Library, and a private collector rumored to be none other than Leonardo DiCaprio.This print of the poster comes up for auction (the date hasn't been set) because the owner, collector Kenneth Schacter, put it up for sale for $850,000 on movieposterexchange.com while in the midst of a Chapter 11 reorganization bankruptcy, but when authorities figured this out, they forced him into a Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy, so here we are.

German painter Heinz Schulz-Neudamm made the poster Lang's film, which is about the dystopian year 2026. (Get ready.) A poster expert named Sean Linkenback gave an interesting interview to comic industry blog Bleeding Cool back when the poster showed up for sale on the Web, explaining the tiny world of movie poster collectors in which he notes why posters like this are so rare: "I think it really stems from the fact that posters were just never available to the public, you couldn’t walk into a theater and buy one to take home — where could people get one if they wanted one?" So perhaps as an alternative retirement plan, we should buy up some of 2011's best movie posters, in the hopes that in 85 years, just one of them pans out. Our money is on Scream 4. (It's safe to assume we will never retire.)