The 10 most expensive vintage posters ever sold

A poster is printed to be thrown away. It goes up in a cinema lobby for a fortnight, it comes down, and someone folds it into a bin. That is the whole reason the survivors are worth what they are. The value sits less in the artwork than in the accident of one copy not being destroyed, and in the fact that two people found out about it at the same time.

Every figure below is the price as reported at the time of the sale, with the house and the date, so it can be checked. One of the ten was knocked down in pounds rather than dollars, so its heading carries the dollar figure and the list can be read straight down; the sum actually paid follows in brackets. Private sales are left out, which keeps one very famous poster off the list. There is a note about it at the end.

1. Original artwork for Star Wars by Tom Jung — $3,875,000

Sold by Heritage Auctions in Dallas in December 2025, in its Hollywood and Entertainment sale. This is the acrylic and airbrush painting that became the first Star Wars poster in May 1977, not a printed copy of it, which is why it sits so far above everything else here. The producer Gary Kurtz kept it and hung it in his office, and it passed to his daughter. The buyer stayed anonymous.

2. Moulin Rouge — La Goulue, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — $529,600 (£314,500)

Christie's, London, May 2014, where it made £314,500. Printed in 1891, this was the first poster Toulouse-Lautrec made for the Moulin Rouge, showing the dancer Louise Weber under her stage name La Goulue. The estimate topped out at £180,000 and the lot finished about three quarters above it. It remains the benchmark for the nineteenth-century French poster, a field that predates cinema entirely.

3. Dracula, style A one sheet, 1931 — $525,800

Heritage Auctions, November 2017. One of only two known copies of this design for the Bela Lugosi film, and the highest price ever paid at auction for a printed film poster. Universal's advertising department produced several styles for each release; almost all of them were returned to the exchange and pulped. What is left is a handful of sheets from a print run nobody thought worth recording.

4. London After Midnight, 1927 — $478,000

Heritage Auctions, November 2014. The film itself is lost. The last known print burned in a vault fire at MGM in 1965, so the poster is one of the few surviving traces of a Lon Chaney picture that people can now only read about. That is an unusual kind of scarcity: the object is not rare because collectors want it, it is wanted because nothing else remains.

5. Casablanca, Italian four-fogli, 1946 — $478,000

Heritage Auctions, July 2017, matching the London After Midnight figure exactly. Italy did not see Casablanca until after the war, and the poster made for that first release carries artwork by Luigi Martinati that has almost nothing in common with the American campaign. It measures more than six feet tall. Only one copy is known.

6. The Mummy, 1932 — $453,500

Sotheby's, New York, 1997. Three copies are thought to survive, one of them owned by the Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett. For eight years this was the most expensive film poster ever sold, and it has an instructive second act: a copy was offered again at Sotheby's in 2018 with an opening bid of $950,000 and found no buyer. A reserve set above what the room will pay ends the lot before it starts.

7. King Kong, style B three sheet, 1933 — $388,375

Heritage Auctions, November 2012. A three sheet is roughly forty by eighty inches, printed in sections and pasted up outside the cinema, which is precisely why so few came through intact. Large-format posters were harder to store, harder to move and worth nothing at the time, so survival rates fall sharply as the size goes up.

8. Casablanca, six sheet, 1942 — $384,000

Heritage Auctions, November 2020, from the original American release rather than the Italian one above. At around eighty inches square it is bigger again, and it was linen-backed, a conservation treatment that has become standard for sheets of this value. Two Casablanca posters in one top ten says something about how a film's reputation and its paper trail feed each other.

9. Frankenstein, style C three sheet, 1931 — $358,500

Heritage Auctions, March 2015. The only known example of this design, and it was found by a teenager working at a Long Island cinema who came across it in a boarded-up projection booth. The theatre had evidently been reusing it for reissues through the 1930s and 1940s. Nearly every record poster has a story like this behind it, because the ones kept deliberately were kept by studios and are still in archives.

10. The Bride of Frankenstein, style D one sheet, 1935 — $334,600

Heritage Auctions, November 2007. Two years later, in November 2009, the only known style B one sheet for The Black Cat made exactly the same amount at the same house. Universal's horror cycle of the early 1930s accounts for a striking share of the top of this market, largely because Karoly Grosz was designing the posters and because so few of them lasted.

The one that is not on the list

The German three-sheet for Fritz Lang's Metropolis is usually called the most valuable poster in the world. It changed hands for $690,000 in 2005, but through a London dealer, not on the block, so it does not belong in a ranking of auction prices. It did reach an auction eventually: in December 2012 a bankruptcy court in Los Angeles sold it as part of a group of nine posters that made $1.2 million together. No individual price was ever published.

What a fundraising evening can take from this

Three things carry over to a room with twenty lots and a school gym floor. The first is that scarcity has to be stated. Nobody bids six figures on a sheet of paper because it is old; they bid because the catalogue says one copy is known. Your donated print or signed shirt has a comparable fact attached to it somewhere, and finding it is worth more than a better photograph. There is a short section on writing lot descriptions in the guide.

The second is that a reserve set too high does not protect a lot, it kills it. The Mummy sat unsold in 2018 because the floor was above the room. If you are unsure, a low opening bid with a real contest behind it beats a high one with silence, and the how it works page covers how opening bids and increments behave in practice.

The third is that the last minute decides everything. Toulouse-Lautrec's poster passed its top estimate by three quarters at the end, not the beginning. A lot that closes on a hard timer cuts off the bidder who was still making up their mind, which is why a late bid should push the clock out rather than run into it. Art, prints and collectables donated for a cause behave much the same way, and the page for art auctions goes into how to group them.

You can build a lot list and run a full rehearsal before committing to anything. There is a walk-through at getting started, and the help pages answer the questions that come up on the night.

Prices as reported at the time of sale, including buyer's premium where the house stated it.