I like trailers but I rarely watch them anymore. The last one that really excited me was for Dunkirk. (I did already know what was going to happen in that story). Of course I was interested when the Solo trailer came out, but I actually still haven’t seen the movie. It’d almost be better in some cases like that to not see the trailer.
I always liked trailers (I remember as a kid watching a show on late-night Sci-Fi channel that was all trailers for old sci-fi b-movies) but in college I went in deep - I joined the executive board of the movie club on campus (which I’ve mentioned before, we showed second-run 35mm movies in a lecture hall with a full-size movie screen every weekend) and my job was setting up the advertising slides that played before the movie, and then of course the trailers for next week’s movies.
We mostly did new second-run movies, but would fairly regularly have old ones as well, or for example another student group would want to have a movie relevant to their group. In those cases, it was often harder to track down the trailers - I would have to get DVDs of them from the school library, and rip the trailer from the DVD. For Ghostbusters, of all things (which was awesome on a beat-to-hell 35mm print), I got a library card for the county the university is in so I could check out their Ghostbusters DVD because the school didn’t have it.
When you get into watching old trailers, it’s mildly shocking how chock-full of outright spoilers they are - with no obfuscation or anything clever. Many of them just flat-out reveal the entire plot - check out the trailer for The Graduate for a good example (we showed that, and I debated whether to show the trailer or not because it’s so spoilery, but it would have been the only time I didn’t show a trailer and I wanted people to come see it).
In theory I like the idea of obfuscating in the previews, but really I think you actually need so little in the trailer to give a feel for the movie that it seems unnecessary at best, and counterproductive at worst - personally if I think I know everything from the trailer (even if I’m wrong because the trailer was intentional misdirection) I’m certainly less likely to want to see it… unless of course it has a lot of other things going for it in which case I’d probably want to see it whether I watched the trailer or not.
IMO the best previews are the “teasers”, not full trailers. Those make you actually want to see things, even when they end up being bad movies. So I guess one could argue that the full trailers are necessary to avoid wasting one’s time on bad movies… but as you point out, trailers can be very misleading - intentional or not.
Agreed completely, and I think a very good point in the spoiler discussion. It’s absolutely true that if the movie is good, spoilers don’t really matter in the end. It doesn’t matter that I already know the twists and turns, I enjoy Casablanca every time. If anything, the twists get even more enjoyable on each subsequent viewing of that one.
In the initial draft of my rant about spoilers I mentioned Lawrence of Arabia, where they famously intentionally spoil you at the very beginning. But, I was going to get into detail about it and I didn’t want to spoil that intentional spoil for anyone who hasn’t seen it
I was talking about how I thought it was odd that Toy Story spoilered the “I am your father” line with my daughter, and she was like, oh everyone totally knows that twist, even little kids. ok. Seems like a big surprise to leak out there, but I guess it’s out there.
I’m only loosely familiar with the movies, but yeah, that is a great way to get people interested, IMO. (I noticed that there are of course a couple of regular trailers for the movie too).
Actually, some old movies did something sort of similar, having an actor or the director say something about it, sometimes shown on camera talking, sometimes just a voiceover. A personal appeal to the audience that they should see their movie.
I think today, creating something like the Bob Ross spoof exclusively as pre-release advertising is the way to go. Obviously would be harder for a serious drama, though regular trailers for serious dramas are usually pretty good these days.
I think that’s one of the most interesting examples actually - everyone seems to know Star Wars by osmosis. It’s perhaps the one example where the surprise is permanently spoiled, not that it really matters that much, though I do wonder what it was like to see it on opening day in 1980 not knowing that yet.
I think also though that perhaps that plot point isn’t as interesting or shocking to kids as the hive mind seems to think it is. Or maybe I was a weird kid.
Interesting thought. I’m reminded of Planet of the Apes, where the 2001 remake tried to have a different twist, presumably because everyone who’s heard of the original knows the end. But I doubt that’s so permanent.
If you go beyond movies, I think the definitive example would be Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where what was once a surprise is now not just well known but a common idiom. That’s something I would love to have been able to read without knowing, but even dictionaries have the spoiler.
And then PK Dick did something similar in A Scanner Darkly, where somewhere in the narrative Bob Arctor and his cover ID Fred diverge into two different characters.
And the reader knows they’re one and the same person at the start of the narrative, same as Arctor/Fred knows. But by the time he/they no longer know, the reader isn’t so sure either.
Truth: anyone who knew any Dutch knew “Vader” was someone’s dad as soon as the character names became known in 1977. Yes, Lucas claims it’s a coincidence, but since it’s also how things worked out, it counts.
My brother and I had it narrowed down to either Luke or Han, with the real money on Luke since he was the hero.
aside from seeing the original movie cold – knowing only about the opening sequence back in 1977 – the one thing i VIVIDLY remember about the original trilogy was being completely BLOWN AWAY by the reveal of Vader as Luke’s father when we saw ESB when it came out. i was as disbelieving as you could imagine. i was certain it was a fake-out, until it was clear it wasn’t. i remember the whole theater gasping. i was as stunned as i was when ben kenobi was killed, and that devastated young me – he was my favorite, not luke, not han, not chewie. so Vader’s reveal was a gut-punch all over again.
You can find reaction videos on YouTube wherein kids see that “I am your father” moment. It’s genuinely cool to see if they haven’t had it spoiled. I had my kids watch the movies somewhat younger than I had originally planned, just so the reveal wouldn’t be spoiled for them in a schoolyard. (A preschool classmate in a Vader costume yelling “I am your father!” to passersby was all the motivation I needed to curtail the wait and show my kids the movies at ages 6 and almost-5.) And sure enough, that reveal floored them.
I love trailers. My moviegoing experience is noticeably diminished if I don’t get seated in time to see the previews. Like Jamie Lee Curtis said in Coming Soon, “these previews were often better than the movies themselves, and with good reason: even the worst films should have enough good footage to create two or three exciting minutes.”
An amusingly out-of-the-ordinary trailer is the six-and-a-half-minute-long one for Psycho. Hitchcock himself takes us on a guided tour of the Bates Motel and mansion set, acting as if the murders really happened a short time ago and the Bates property is up for sale. In the trailer, he spoils pretty much every moment and violent act in the movie, and yet somehow doesn’t spoil it at all, but rather leaves the viewer dying to see how this sordid tale plays out. It’s a masterful tease of the movie.
I avoid spoilers not so much to avoid pre-knowledge of specific twists and surprises, but more to preserve the filmmaker’s intent of how they want to tell the story to me. Few filmmakers get the privilege of controlling their movie’s marketing efforts the way Hitchcock did with that Psycho trailer, so I like to give them the courtesy of allowing them to unfold the story into my mind they way they best intend. I can always rewatch an enjoyable movie as many times as I want after that first viewing, and knowing how the story shakes out may not diminish my enjoyment then. But I only get that First Viewing Experience once, so I try to keep it unspoiled.
But I don’t really try to avoid trailers, since I like them. So it’s a bummer if too much plot is revealed in a trailer, usually.
By the way, here’s Coming Soon, a love letter to old Universal horror movie trailers by John Landis and Mick Garris. It’s a fun hour if you like that kind of stuff.
