The Problem with Trailers
As this decade comes to an end and we all look back on how cinema has changed, one of the biggest changes you'll notice are blockbusters and their trailers. Marketing is crucial for films to thrive in a theater setting, and to get audiences opening weekend studios have developed a format to build up hype and anticipation. Release a teaser six months to a year before the film drops, cut an official trailer that has more footage, drop another trailer with the same scenes but slightly more footage, repeat until opening day. This allows fans of the franchise to speculate and movie news outlets to cover the same content week after week, month after month, adding to the movie's anticipation. And because of that modern trailers have evolved to the point where it's separate from the movie and more often than not mis-markets what the movie actually is.
A classic example would be the Suicide Squad trailer from 2015. This comic-con trailer probably represented what the movie was going to be like originally. Dark, atmosphere-ic, mature. It utilizes standard trailer edits by setting up the movie with voice overs, flash cuts of team members, add a covers song, random montage of footage with scenes that'll make fans shout "Ooooooooh," until they end the trailer on a reveal and a stinger. This is fairly standard trailer making up to this point. It shows a lot of footage out of context, has pivotal frames to showcase and tell fans that they know what they're doing, and most importantly they're getting audiences pumped for their film. However, there is another trailer that changed all this, and the game of trailer making.
In 2016 Warner Bros. released another trailer of Suicide Squad and this time it had a whole new direction. It was fun, bright, colorful, fast edits and had one of the most recognizable songs attached to it. Only problem with this was it represented a movie that Suicide Squad most likely was not, and because there was so much feedback on this version of the trailer Warner Bros. apparently recut the film with this trailer house. Unfortunately, this version was advertising something the movie was not, and changed fan expectations so much that the studio had to change the film to match it.
Now, trailers are more in the middle of these two versions. If you watch a trailer to any blockbuster you'll start to see how similar they all are, because trailers are all using the same beats. The problem with this is trailers have been getting longer, and releasing so much footage, that generally they'll forgo plot to bring scenes to life mixed together with random footage, which more often than not shows the ending of the movie, out of context. The problem gets even bigger once fans see and analyze every frame of a trailer, and because trailers are made while the film is still being cut key scenes that they show will sometimes be omitted from the final product.
Trailers are supposed to bring expectations, not of what the movie will bring to plot or meaning, but of scenes that audiences have been waiting for. For example, one scene in the trailer for Jason Bourne that is heavily highlighted was his one punch knockout. In the movie they had that scene, but used a different angle. Instead of seeing the full knockout you see Jason hit the guy and him falling out of frame. The final cut doesn't have the same impact that fans have been watching for months leading up to the film. The Force Awakens is a trailer all about expectations. Every frame is supposed to blow your mind as they subvert what Star Wars used to mean.
From music to specific scenes the trailers of today are not trying to get you to see the movie, but to relive the scenes that they promised you. With their fast cuts and abundance of footage it can get tiring watching the same product, but with different actors, over and over again. In some cases people find that they enjoyed the trailers more than the movie simply because the trailers are shorter versions of said movies. They cut out all the fat and play the greatest hits whether they be action, character turning points, or the entire plot. But it can also have the opposite effect, recently there was fan outcry over A Dog's Way Home trailer because it showed the entire movie from beginning, middle, to end. Now this movie wasn't going to do big at the box office, it wasn't some mega-IP adaptation, and yet it was met with shock and at times hatred over audience members crying over the trailer "spoiling" the movie.
That's another avenue of fandom where trailers had to adapt, fear of spoilers. Even though trailers contain a lot of footage from the third act, and in many cases the final shot, fan attitude toward trailers have been of the mindset that they should show them everything while at the same time telling them nothing. This is tricky as the growth of modern movie going audiences are now counting nigh everything as a spoiler. Sometimes they'll even argue that the first act is a spoiler. So what are trailers to do? Why, they put everything out of context and switch up the meaning of certain scenes via voice over. So now the duty of a trailer company is to present the film, while lying to the fans at the same as telling what the film is. In essence, trailer making has become complicated.
At the end of the day trailers are but the marketing tools to get those fat wallets into seats, and yet as we've seen over the last few years studio plans to hype up a movie, to give it astronomical attention, has had an opposite affect where trailers now have little to do with the final product, and much more to do with the lead up to the final product as well as having a culture all of its own via speculation posts. Not only is this dangerous as it's giving a promise to what the final product may not be, but it also cultivates in audience minds what to expect from the movie, and if the movie does not follow the trailer then they've been lied to, and that's bad. Give them a year or two to get over that and see the film for what it truly is, but when the goal is to get them into opening night rather than multiple times over a period of weeks it can inevitably hurt the movie. So where do trailers go from here? Well, in a perfect world trailers would dial it back and have one minute of footage and the theme from the score, but alas that'll never happen and more than likely trailers will continue to show more and more footage while omitting the plot altogether, almost making an experimental short of the movie.
