A very common pose for movie posters and game cover art is to feature the main character posing with a firearm, often a pistol. A pistol is usually used to convey that the character is armed and dangerous and has intent to shoot, but not as overpowering as an assault rifle would be. Sometimes this is done for marketing reasons: a character may be known for their martial arts or other character traits, but if they hold a pistol anywhere in the story it'll be presented in promotional art to make the work look more action-focused and appeal to a broader audience. But since a pistol is small, it's also easier to downplay it visually by holding it to the side.
This isn't exclusive to pistols: assault rifles and shotguns are also used for more aggressive characters, but they're more limited in how they can pose and express with them. It is also common to spoof this by having something else being held, like a banana or finger-guns, but still pose with the same serious reverence as with a real firearm.
See also: Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You, the more audience-aggressive variant. If there are two characters, it may also be a Back-to-Back Poster.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: One visual for the anime shows Mista aiming and pointing his revolver forward.
- Macross Frontier has an in-story war propaganda commercial in which Sheryl Nome gives a pistol pose after she shoots you.
- Sakamoto Days has many volume covers and chapter illustrations holding pistols, including the characters who rarely, if ever, use guns.
Arts
- Banksy's famous Pulp Fiction painting near London's Old Street. It depicted the characters of Jules and Vincent in their famous pistol pose, but holding bananas instead of guns
... until the council decided it was graffiti, not art, and had it painted over. A version was promptly produced with Jules and Vincent actually holding guns... While wearing banana suits◊.
Films — Live-Action
- James Bond. Actually, there are tons of such poses on promotional material. On the DVD covers, they even added arms with pistols. Sometimes it's pretty obvious.
- 3:10 to Yuma (2007) featured a variant: the character depicted was holding on to a revolver, but by the chamber, not the handle.
- The poster and DVD art for the film version of Undercover Brother. Star Eddie Griffin complained about this, noting that the character never uses a gun.
- Posters for You Don't Mess with the Zohan have the title character (an Israeli commando who wants to be a hair dresser) brandishing hair dryers. Interestingly, at least one poster shows him with a rifle strapped to his back.
- The poster art for the Wesley Snipes movie The Art of War.
- Not the standard "hand-on-the-elbow" pistol pose, but the posters for Wanted resulted in protests in the UK because of their glamorizing gun violence.
- On the poster◊ for The Killer (1989), Chow Yun-fat combines this with Gory Discretion Shot.
- Some of the promotional posters for Serenity show River posing with a pistol which, ironically, is used by Jayne in the movie, though she steals it from him and levels it at the camera in one scene.
- Both Nikita and the English-language remake Point of No Return both had movie posters that feature this trope.
- The Matrix Reloaded had various characters doing so in their promo posters. The page pic is Agent Smith's poster, featuring the film's title across his crotch.
- A common subversion is to have the character holding the pistol loose in one hand by their side, indicating that they're highly tired:
- The Jodie Foster film The Brave One.
- The poster for The Untouchables (1987) has the other three Untouchables holding rifles in the back as Kevin Costner is about to shoot you and under a giant Robert De Niro as Evil Overlooker.
- Posters for the Harry Potter films have done with with wands instead of guns.
- Johnny English: the first film has Rowan Atkinson pointing a gun at the camera.
Literature
- US editions of The Lost Fleet invariably have someone who's presumably meant to be the protagonist dressed like a Space Marine and doing some kind of heroic pose on the cover. nothing remotely like this event ever happens in the book, and later volumes in the series actually start Leaning on the Fourth Wall to complain about it.
Live-Action TV
- Although it's not a firearm, some of the Publicity Stills from the new Doctor Who show the Ninth Doctor holding his sonic screwdriver in a similar manner. Although in the right circumstances, it's more useful than a gun. After all, you can only shoot the lock off so many times, and you can't shoot the lock on even once. (Except with Captain Jack's Sonic Disrupter.)
- Such a pose is part of the standard Charlie's Angels logo, although it's often just one of the three.
Pro Wrestling
- Legend Mick Foley, in his Cactus Jack persona, does this with his fingers as his signature pose.
Video Games
- ANNO: Mutationem: Two in-universe collectible posters, "A Dangerous Day" and "No Way to Escape" depicts a person holding their gun in a pistol pose.
- Campaign posters in Left 4 Dead.
- The posters in Left 4 Dead 2 mix it up with melee weapons instead of guns.
- Similarly, all the characters in the Team Fortress 2's "Meet the Team" line-up, the Spy in particular.
- Shadow the Hedgehog pulls this off on the box art of his own game, as well as some promotional artwork.
- Lara Croft in most Tomb Raider games is seen holding her pistols on the box art.
- The cover of BioShock Infinite predominantly features Booker (the player protagonist) slinging a shotgun on his shoulder. The cover art actually triggered a pretty massive debate around its release, with many criticizing the cover as a "dumbing down" of the artistically-challenging prestige established with BioShock (the cover arts of BioShock 1 and BioShock 2 similarly focused on a single character, but evoking much more of their gritty, Art Deco and Diesel Punk style). The official reasoning for the cover is that 1) it already is reflecting of the game's more action-y tone, 2) it was indeed meant to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator, built on a presumption that those that were already interested in its setting, story, and themes were most likely already going to buy the game anyway, and didn't need an artsier cover to convince them, and 3) it was also meant to appeal to the game's publisher during mid-development, as playing with the intent of broad appeal allowed them to be more forgiving regarding delays and additional budget matters.
- Doom (2016) also rather infamously had one of these covers, a static image of the Doom Slayer standing with a shotgun and not much else. This was widely slammed for being generic, and was one of the factors that led to initial skepticism that ironically accentuated the almost universal acclaim the game itself received. Even during the leadup to the release, id Software provided an alternate reversible cover — instead a much more ornate, mural-like shot of Doom Slayer in the middle of singlehandedly fighting through a horde of demons — a style which was locked in for Doom Eternal's cover art from the get-go.
- Fallout: New Vegas breaks with Fallout's usual tradition of putting Powered Armor on the cover to instead show an NCR Ranger with a revolver in hand.
- The cover of the first Max Payne game is a black and white drawing of the title character posing with a beretta in his hand.
Real Life
- One, the right arm pointing to the shoulder, is in fact the British Sign Language symbol for James Bond.
- There are a number of accepted methods of holding a weapon that resemble this trope, albeit with little details like keeping ones finger off the trigger for safety. The easiest ways to hold a weapon without pointing it at something unintentionally are to hold it pointing upwards or downwards. In the case of a longer weapon like a rifle or shotgun, the most practical method typically is to hold the weapon against your torso, with the weapon pointed across your chest and upwards ("Ready Arms") or downward ("Port Arms").