I once nearly bailed on a date with someone who said being late to a movie was better because ‘you miss the ads’. The intent of her comment was to merely express distaste for the deluge of commercials we’re battered with when we go to the movies. But all I heard was that I wouldn’t be seeing any film trailers that night. As odd as it may sound, one of my favorite elements of the cinema experience is watching trailers—loud, crisp, and huge—in the theatre.
The last 12 months have been a somewhat tedious time for trailer addicts. With the pandemic closing many cinemas around the globe, we’re seeing more and more trailers for films whose release dates grow further and further away. Trailers for the much anticipated films Black Widow, No Time To Die, A Quiet Place Part II and Candyman were released and re-released with the announcement of a new arrival date for the film each time.
In a time where most of us scroll for content, what makes people linger to watch film trailers in full?
As 2020 continued into lockdowns everywhere, streaming reached all-time highs, and the question of what purpose trailers served in this new paradigm began to play on my mind. In a time where most of us scroll for content, taking in fragments of information, what makes people linger to watch film trailers in full?
A trailer for a big blockbuster should make you curious without confusing you, permit you to know the premise without giving away the plot, sell you on who is going to satiate your curiosity, and when you can see it all unfold. They’re advertisements, first and foremost, but where traditional advertisements use stories to sell products, in a trailer the product is the story. In a year where I watched more trailers than new films, I realised there is indeed an art to the trailer that we cannot afford to lose, lest we allow the mighty algorithm to sell stories to us.
The trailer for a highly anticipated release is a delicate act. But no film has performed this act more superbly in recent years than The Social Network in 2010. The trailer won the Grand Key Art Award in 2011, Hollywood’s most recognized awards competition for advertising and communications. Since then, the trailer has become widely regarded as one of the greatest of all time. It was also lauded to have saved the film from the disinterest from movie goers.
There is indeed an art to the trailer that we cannot afford to lose, lest we allow the mighty algorithm to sell stories to us.
Clocking in at 2 minutes and 28 seconds, the trailer opens with a montage of people using Facebook’s interface as Radiohead’s ‘Creep’, covered ethereally and eerily by the Belgian girls’ choir, builds in the background. This continues for 50 seconds before we see Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, just another face in the feed until it de-pixelates into 85 now-all-too-familiar cuts from the film. Each cut is more tantalising than the next, getting faster and faster. ‘Creep’ doesn’t stop either, serving as the sonic connection linking the Facebook feed in the opening to the film scenes, until it all slows down for one last sequential scene: the one where Mark insists he deserves recognition from Harvard’s disciplinary board for crashing the servers.
In less than two and half minutes this trailer not only tells you what the film is about without spoiling it, but also why you need to see it. There’s a reason the montage of the average person’s Facebook feed goes for almost a third of the trailer’s runtime—it’s connecting an activity in your life to the story about to be shown. Even the ‘Creep’ cover teases something uniquely sinister in a song we all know.
The trailer for a highly anticipated release is a delicate act. No film has performed this act more superbly in recent years than the The Social Network.
The Social Network occupies a somewhat dubious place in film culture. Directed by David Fincher, many felt the film was snubbed when it lost out on Best Picture and Best Director awards during the 2011 awards season, and it was also repeatedly belittled by its real life subject, Mark Zuckerberg. (Notably, the film was recognised for its music, with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross winning the Golden Globe for Best Score and the Academy Award for Best Original Score.) However, the film’s impact on the art of film trailers can be found in contemporary pop culture.
Between the eerie rendition of ‘I Am Woman’ in the recent Cruella trailer, and the creepy cover of Destiny’s Child’s ‘Say My Name’ featured in the trailer for Nia DeCosta’s Candyman, The Social Network trailer left a legacy of tantalising audiences by tiptoeing the ledge between the familiar and unfamiliar. There are even many a listicle dedicated to sad covers featured in trailers.
The Social Network led trailers away from classic ‘In a world…’ style narration to slick quick cuts that let the film’s dialogue speak for itself, as well as oodles of edgy pop covers. But the attention economy is bringing this era to its inevitable end.
By and large, trailers—for blockbusters at least—feel increasingly like compressed versions of whole films, rather than merely a taste.
Some trailers in the last decade have innovated as social media became more and more enmeshed with pop culture. Trailers like The Hunger Games franchise’s unsettling Capitol broadcast campaign, which positioned the audience as members of the oppressive Capitol. In a similar way, the Deadpool film trailers utilised the 4th wall-breaking antihero to directly address audiences without spoiling the film itself.
But these are exceptions; by and large, trailers—for blockbusters at least—feel increasingly like compressed versions of whole films, rather than merely a taste. The first trailer for Thor: Ragnarok revealed the long awaited return of Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, despite it being built up as a mystery in the film itself. Likewise, the final trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker revealed Palpatine’s return, and the Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer spoiled the first appearance of Wonder Woman. In recent years, trailers for films rarely seem interested in piquing one’s curiosity with a handful of specially chosen cuts, lines of dialogue and great music; the rule nowadays seems to involve cramming in all the film’s biggest talking points. It’s not just trailers either, but promos and teasers too. Data mining from social media, now widely used to inform the creation of blockbuster film promotion, has shown the ideal length for a social media promo is 45 seconds,which leaves very little time for artful crafting. The ‘best bits’ are prioritised in a way that can be misleading and even spoil the film being advertised.
Where The Social Network trailer connected the uniqueness of the Facebook origin story with the mundane pervasiveness of the audience’s feed, many trailers now seem to be dictated by what will get audiences to share the content. They appeal to the audience’s desire to show they already know the story, increasing its ‘shareability’ rather than forming a more intriguing connection. This can be seen more recently in a much talked about trailer for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which included a snippet of Jared Leto’s Joker quoting the infamous ‘we live in a society’ meme. Of course, it’s not all trailers, but it is the majority and it demonstrates a shift in the purpose of trailers in the 2020s.
The art of the trailer is a dying one, asphyxiating under the strain of the oversaturated attention economy.
It’s true the trailer can be better than the movie, but lately the trailer is the movie. Many trailers now are the experience of the film made miniature to convince audiences to see the real thing, going so far as to skim through the film’s major plot points in an effort to not just grab, but maintain the attention of the potential audience. The art of the trailer is a dying one, asphyxiating under the strain of the oversaturated attention economy, making films feel less satisfying along the way.
Occasionally, there are glimpses of the art fighting to stay alive though. We can find it in the horror-esque teaser of season 4 of The Crown, in the noir-ish grunge of Nirvana’s ‘Something in the Way’ over bloodsoaked cuts in the trailer for The Batman, and even in the earliest trailers for WandaVision by Disney+. A good trailer straddles the line between art and advertisement, a great one renders them indistinguishable and can mean the difference between a film’s life or death.
What blockbuster trailers will look like ten years from now is anyone’s guess, but an increase in the use of AI to create trailers based on social media data points to an ominous drop in the human touch that created gems like The Social Network trailer. For now, however, maybe it’s enough to hope that as cinemas begin to reopen, trailers for unreleased films will soon cease to feel like mere ghosts of a time long past.
