The Trouble With Movie Trailers

This article contains minor spoilers for "Avengers: Endgame," and discussion of other films' third acts — though these films are older, and the details in question were given away in the films' trailers.

The summer movie season is in full swing, and personally, I'm excited to spend as much time gawking at blockbusters in air-conditioned theaters as my free time and wallet will allow. The weekend before I saw "Avengers: Endgame" I went to a small theater to see Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris" for the first time — my temporary farewell to my patience for challenging cinema, which always seems to dry up once it stays light out past 7pm.

Over the next few weeks and months, I'm going to immerse myself in a world with Pokémon, sit in stunned silence as John Wick absolutely wrecks dozens of also-ran assassins, cheer for the sweet, innocent webslinger from Queens and, almost certainly, grouse about how I still think "Hobbs & Shaw" shouldn't have been made while also admitting I had a fun time at the movies. Unfortunately, I'll also be thinking way too much about how much the trailers for these movies gave away about the films. To me, it feels as though the trailers parceling out the right amount of information about a movie are few and far between these days.

In recent years, thanks to the rise of unending franchises combined with increasingly web-savvy marketing campaigns, the broader conversation surrounding movie trailers has morphed considerably — and to my mind, so have the ideas of what makes for a good trailer. Since the advent of YouTube, fans and media outlets catering to them have been eager to over-analyze trailers (and though we don't tend to do trailer breakdowns here at Digg, we post trailers for the same reason all the other sites post trailers and breakdowns: traffic). There are, as I see it, two strategies that trailers commonly employ to cater to these wants: revealing very little about a film's plot (perfect for a "what does [blank] mean" articles) or, conversely, stuffing as many moments from the movie into the trailer as possible (good for "the X best moments from the trailer"). There's also the strategy of making trailers with red herring footage not intended for the final film, but I can only think of one recent culprit.

Being no expert, I didn't want to write hundreds of words on how these trends in movie trailer editing make me feel without bringing in some more qualified observations. I spoke with Evelyn Watters and Monica Brady of The Golden Trailer Awards, a show started in 1999 that recognizes the best work in trailers, posters and other movie marketing materials. I chatted with Watters and Brady about four trailers in particular — three I feel are representative of my nitpicks with modern trailers, and one that I think knocked it out of the park.

The 'Tell Everything' Approach

Setting aside my distaste for this spin-off's premise, the second full-length "Hobbs & Shaw" trailer is actually guilty of something that the "Fast & Furious" movies have been doing in their trailers since its fifth installment: spoiling something huge about the action in the third act. Why the hell would you show the bank vault scene from the fifth film, the Dodge Charger ramming through an exploding plane in the sixth, or the climatic ramp-over-a-submarine moment from the eighth?¹ I understand selling these movies primarily on the basis of the outlandish action, but that submarine moment certainly didn't land great when I finally saw it in theaters months later.

The "why" behind front-loading these moments makes sense when considering that folks like me are undoubtedly just a fraction of the audience the trailer reaches. "The studios have a responsibility to the superfan, who is already going to go, and then they have this odd outlier who is this new person who can't jump in at or doesn't feel like they can just jump in," said Monica Brady of information and action heavy trailers like this. "It's a dual cap that the marketers and studios have to wear sometimes, to entice both these types of people. They're large movies, and they need to score big in those opening weekends." While I'm the type considering getting a #Justice4Han hat, the marketers and editors calling the shots for these trailers have determined that the ever-smaller portion of moviegoers who could be fans of the "Fast" movies but aren't yet need a large taste of the film to show the appeal and that, yes, they'll be able to follow the plot. What better way to do that than jam as much of it into the trailer as possible?

The Super Teasers

I'm going to credit Star Wars with popularizing, if not inventing, what I consider to be the teaser-on-steroids approach. The first teaser for "Rise of the Skywalker," like those for "The Force Awakens" and "The Last Jedi" before it, shows plenty of glimpses of characters and recognizably Star Wars-y things without telling much, if anything, about what the hell is going on — but notably, the "Rise of the Skywalker" teaser is also calling all the way back to the first teaser released for "The Phantom Menace." Reusing the "every generation has a legend" card, the teasers are explicitly connected — but even as the first sans-dialogue minute of the trailer for "The Phantom Menace" feels like it could've been made today, it abruptly kicks into a conventional mode as it sets up who Anakin Skywalker is. Not so with "Rise of the Skywalker."

I think this style of trailer, with its emphasis on visuals and emotion over nuts-and-bolts storytelling, is still fun to experience on first watch and revisit on its own, as they feel like they get to have the most identity and flair that's all their own (the swell of the music in the "The Rise of the Skywalker" trailer just sent chills down my spine again). But these kinds of trailers say little and generate the most annoying coverage; in the absence of substance and in constant need of content, people spin analysis and theories practically out of thin air. Who needs thousands of words about what a new Star Wars trailer might be setting up for the movie when the message is so plainly evident: "it's another Star Wars movie" — or in this case, "it's the last one in the main series, promise."

This departure from the old conventions of movie trailers hinges in no small part on the direction franchise filmmaking has developed in. Evelyn Watters broke it down like so: "Take what makes a trailer: for the most part, since the beginning [of the form], you set the scene, you build up the story, you set the hook. That's a typical trailer. You don't do that if you're already into the universe; you throw that out the window and you start again."

Taking a step back to see what "The Rise of the Skywalker" trailer has to work with, it's hard to know what one would even choose to put forward in a plot-heavy trailer: the entire Star Wars sequel trilogy thus far has taken steps to reestablish the Rebellion-versus-Empire status quo of the original trilogy, so it has fewer new ideas to tease than "The Phantom Menace" trailer did. To put it another way: if the imagination behind the film amounts to little more than "more Star Wars" (to the point that "Rise of the Skywalker" may undo the unconventional developments of "The Last Jedi"), then what should a trailer for it be other than two minutes of largely recycled Star Wars-y audio-visual delights?

The 'Infinity War' Red Herrings

So, we need to talk about Marvel. Across the 22 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there have been trailers that have given away too much and trailers that have told viewers practically nothing about the movie in question, but with last year's "Infinity War," the studio took things in another direction: purposeful misdirection. This is a dicey charge to level, as Watters and Brady reminded me during our talk, because trailers are often cut months if not a year in advance of the film's final edit, meaning that footage from the cutting room floor regularly makes it on-screen in trailers. Now, even though you could imagine a world where Hulk joining the charge in Wakanda was once part of "Infinity War," given that the directors of the film admitted to intentionally misdirecting viewers with the trailers, the simpler explanation is that the Hulk was never actually going to be in the scene at all.

Subtler and certainly intentional misdirection is the elision of a few Infinity Stones on Thanos' gauntlet while he grapples with Captain America. In a world where folks take time to compare every shot in the trailers against the actual film and actors don't get to see whole scripts for scenes they're in, the idea of using (or not using) a little effects work here or there to protect plot details about a movie makes sense — and, though it's a little above-and-beyond, I don't think it's against the spirit of what movie trailers aim to do.

The Golden Trailer Awards even have a category, the Golden Fleece, that recognizes the best trailers that do a better job selling a movie than the quality of the film itself might suggest possible (past winners include "The Meg," "Resident Evil: The Final Chapter" and "Pixels"). "They often reorder the sequence of the clips that are shown," said Watters. "They do it in such an artful way because they know they need to." I'd argue that editing trailers for "Infinity War" such that it seems like the Thanos/Captain America fight happens in the second act, as opposed to five minutes before the end of the film, could make it a worthy Golden Fleece competitor.

("Endgame" spoilers ahead) Likewise, without any CGI misdirection my knowledge, the trailers for "Endgame" largely plucked scenes from the first thirty minutes of the movie, emphasizing the dour post-snap moods of the surviving Avengers. Imagine if, since it had already been leaked over a year ago, the trailers actually hinted at and played up the second act time travel heist? The marketing would've taken on a wholly different tone — one more reflective of the bulk of the movie's runtime. The choice to lean into the weightier emotions in the marketing makes perfect sense, though. Red herring footage or no, these misdirections are a little more palatable to me after seeing the completed movie, even if they (like those Star Wars teasers) sent the internet into speculation overdrive.

The Good Stuff

So what, you might ask if you've gotten this far, do I actually want out of a movie trailer? I think the first "Detective Pikachu" trailer — which I certainly had a complicated reaction to when it came out — is actually quite perfect.

This trailer is spinning a couple plates: yes, it's a movie in an established franchise, but it's adapting a little-known corner of it. That means it can't just be a teaser, because it'd leave people with the wrong sorts of questions — so we actually get introduced to the characters and get a rundown of the movie's central mystery. The trailer is also the first time Pokémon have officially been depicted "realistically" (there were no stills or videos from the movie circulated earlier) so it has to include a lot of them in the trailer. On top of all that, it has to give Ryan Reynolds, whose very casting in the role raised eyebrows, a lot of space to convince people of his take on Pikachu… which is the only part I'm still on the fence about.

All in all, though, I think it's a great trailer. Likewise, I think the subsequent trailers and marketing reels for the movie have keyed into the big fan appeal of the movie, which is seeing more Pokémon. With the plot hook already established and no need to gin up needless speculation about how this character will come back to life or if that character's parent is really this character, the movie could generate all the additional buzz off new trailers by just giving more Pokémon to look at. Maybe it's something that only this movie can get away with, but as I settle in for blockbuster season it's been a nice reprieve from trailers that leave me with questions to Google — or feeling like I've just seen a two minute recap of the movie they're promoting.​