Restrikes is a term that confuses a lot of poster collectors. These are not to be confused with reissues, reprints, renames, studio issues or regional print shop variations.

As a young collector, I always heard that the plates that they printed the posters from, were broken as soon as the print run was finished. This is DEFINATELY NOT the case.

Master plates were kept by the lithographer and, for a short time, by the printing company.

When the studio marketing department would put together their projections for a particular release, based on the marketing budget, they would have a certain amount of publicity material printed. This was normally based on the early booking of a film.

BUT sometimes, once the film was released, it would be a larger hit than expected and other theaters would start booking the film. This would cause the studio to go back and have additional posters and material made for the same release. (Unlike a reissue or re-release, which was a different release of the same film)

When the printers had to print more of a previous printed poster, they would pull the plates and put it BACK on the presses.

It's difficult to recreate the exact conditions and put everything exactly like it was before, so quite often this reprinting or restriking of the poster will cause slight variations from the original printing.

A good example of this would be posters for the Halloween. It was a low budget release that did a LOT better than the studios anticipated. Some of the posters were Techinicolor variations, but several additional printings were necessary to fill the demand.