Rare Casablanca Six-Sheet Poster Sells for $187,500 at Heritage Auctions
A rare original-release six-sheet poster for Casablanca has sold for $187,500 at Heritage Auctions, bringing a major piece of Golden Age movie advertising into a new collection. The linen-backed poster sold August 28 as part of Heritage’s Movie Posters Signature Auction. The $187,500 final price includes Heritage’s 25% buyer’s premium, putting the winning bid at $150,000.
The enormous poster measures approximately 78.75 by 80.25 inches and was graded Very Fine- on linen. Heritage described it as one of fewer than a handful of examples it could locate in recorded sales or collections, and only the second Casablanca six-sheet the auction house has handled.
The result follows CollectiblesNews.com’s August 17 preview of the poster and Heritage’s auction, which highlighted the piece as one of the sale’s biggest attractions. Six-sheet posters were among the largest standard movie posters produced for theaters and were often used in ways that made survival difficult. As noted in our earlier coverage, Heritage explained that the oversized displays were frequently pasted directly onto walls, cut apart for custom displays or simply covered by advertising for the next film. That history has left very few intact examples from Casablanca, which makes surviving six-sheets especially desirable among serious movie-poster collectors.
The poster features Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman alongside an extended cast, with Heritage pointing to its large-format artwork, strong color and detailed illustration as advantages over many of the other U.S. posters created for the film. Condition was another important part of the offering. Heritage said the poster retains vibrant color without enhancement. It had received touch-up work to areas of wear and minor paper loss along the folds, as well as portions of the background, title and Bogart’s hair.
The $187,500 result came in below the $384,000 paid for another Casablanca six-sheet sold by Heritage in 2020. That earlier example set what Heritage described at the time as the American auction record for a non-horror movie poster.
Even so, the latest sale adds another major six-figure result for one of the most recognizable films in Hollywood history. Released by Warner Bros. in 1942, Casablanca became a critical and commercial success and went on to become one of the defining films of its era. More than eight decades later, surviving original advertising material from the movie remains a major collecting category, with the largest and rarest formats appearing at auction only occasionally.