Renato Casaro

Renato Casaro (; 26 October 1935 – 30 September 2025) was an Italian artist known for his film posters. He painted over 2,000 posters which included A Fistful of Dollars, Solaris, My Name Is Nobody, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Octopussy, Rambo: First Blood Part II (international version), Red Sonja, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Dances With Wolves.

Casaro is considered one of the most important, influential and innovative Italian film poster artists. He made hundreds of works dedicated to the cinema, becoming very popular abroad. He is best known for his fantasy posters.

Life and career Casaro was born in Treviso on 26 October 1935. Casaro attended a school known for its art program and had a teacher who encouraged him to pursue painting. His early interest in posters reportedly began with movie advertisements. He would go every day to the cinema to see if they were changing the posters, and if they were he would ask if he could take them home where he would try to reproduce them.

In 1953, at age 18, Casaro found a job as a staff artist at Studio Favalli, a famous design and art studio of Rome's film industry. In Rome, at age 21, he opened his own art studio.

Dino De Laurentiis hired Casaro in 1965 to design the poster images for the film The Bible: In the Beginning.... After that, Casaro worked on many films with De Laurentiis, like Flash Gordon, Dune, and Conan the Barbarian.

Casaro stopped designing posters in 1998 as film studios began to adopt digital tools. In 2019, Casaro was called by Quentin Tarantino to realize some "old school illustrated Western posters" ("Uccidimi Subito Ringo, disse il Gringo" aka "Kill Me Now Ringo, Said The Gringo", and "Nebraska Jim") for Italian films starring Rick Dalton, the character Leonardo DiCaprio plays in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Casaro died from bronchopneumonia in Treviso on 30 September 2025, at the age of 89. Upon his death, he was acknowledged as a highly influential poster designer,

Film posters

City Lights (re-release, Italy) King Kong (re-release, Italy) A Fistful of Dollars (1967, USA) Caliber 9 (1972) Flash Gordon (1980, Argentina) Octopussy (1983, with Daniel Goozee) The NeverEnding Story (1984, USA) Red Sonja (1985) Rambo III (1988) 1991: Ciak d'oro for best movie poster – The Sheltering Sky 1992: Jupiter Award for best movie poster – Dances With Wolves