What Creates a Great Movie Trailer
Whether you’re an avid film-goer (or at least, used to be until this year) or just checking something out from your streaming service catalog, for the most you usually learn a little bit about what you’re going to watch before you decide to put it on. A synopsis can be quick and to-the-point and usually takes less than 15 seconds to get a glimpse of what the film entails, minus some of those bizarre Netflix summaries every now and then. However, you can’t necessarily create an immediate picture from the few words a synopsis may offer, and you especially won’t be able to do so with HOW the film itself is going to go about it. A movie trailer is where many of our interests rise into investing our time on a project. We are given a sneak peek into what the film has to offer, whether it’s an uproarious action with enduring chase sequences, a horror comprised of a supernatural entity and a naturally creepy setting of choice, a comedy featuring dimwitted persons in an unprecedented scenario, a fantasy adventure where we can leave our world for a couple of hours just to come back to the actual mediocrity we call life, etc., a trailer is one of the biggest make-it-or-break-it points for a film’s success in persuasion.
There’s many styles, forms, and all in all manners of execution when it comes to how a movie wants to market itself via its trailers. We’ve grown as a society to the point where we have reached peak consumerism as there are now trailers FOR TRAILERS, as done a few times by Marvel for their Avengers’ film lineups. For any film, a trailer is the means of previewing a finished project to someone in the hopes of gaining their interest (and money) on their work, as most product selling works.
Marketing a film itself is a tricky business though, in that the team has to analyze when the proper timing would be for the release the film (imagine being the one to pull trig on releasing Cats the same weekend as The Rise of Skywalker), who the target demographic is, will there be any merchandise or promotional work involved, etc.. Not every movie is on the pinnacle spotlight as aforementioned Star Wars, Spider-Man, and/or James Bond, and won’t sell just from the news of another entry to the franchise. For many trailers, this is the vital algorithm piece that brings it all smoothly together, much like in a Rubix Cube. If the algorithm works, the trailer will naturally play itself out and draw your attention with relative ease. If it doesn’t, you’re right back to square one and wondering ‘why am I still trying to give myself hope for this?’ I’ll dive into some noteworthy trailers and dissect what works, what doesn’t, and why for both spectrum. It’s my hopes and interest of leaving you with some noteworthy takeaways for the next time you’re sitting in a theater and can distinguish what might be a future checkout, or a hard pass (ugh, I miss the dark-lit rooms).
To start off, let’s go ahead and simply break down the formula for many movie trailers. Most include tidbits of dialogue exchanges, usually vital pieces of information to verbally tell a viewer some plot details and hint at what’s to come, while also attaching shots from the film in an inharmonious fashion so that the film doesn’t just outright play itself. Music scores and/or soundtracks respectively follow, along with a general tone or ‘mood’ of the trailer, which may or may not actually be deceiving for better or worse intentions. Everything swells / builds / crescendos its way into seamless editing that should try to gain your interest while at the same time never revealing all that you need to know. And yet, as formulaic and long-lasting as this pattern has been, many marketing teams STILL drop the ball and ruin things.
With everything said, let’s go ahead and work our way from the bottom and work our way upwards in the trailer hierarchy, so that we may have some fun belittling some faulty ones first.
One of the biggest and most notorious ways of drawing negative feedback for any film is, of course, spoiling key plot points, if not revealing big secrets and concealed details to a movie. There’s plenty of film trailers that have committed this trailer sin, and the following are just a few of the worst examples. For all of the following, these are the Official Trailer #2’s of the respective film on YouTube; these are the pencils to the pens. I recommend watching any / all of the following three coming up, but for the purpose of explaining the Terminator: Genisys trailer is the best worst platter I’ll attach for viewing below. Watch it. Or don’t, I’m not a parental supervisor. But the insults will make more sense if you do.
In Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice’s trailer, we are shown that Wonder Woman teams up with our aforementioned superheroes to fight together against a horribly CGI-ed Doomsday, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 trailer quite literally shows the three main villains and their corresponding rise to power, and the Terminator: Genisys blatantly and without hesitation reveals the turning point in the film wherein John Connor is given away as a Terminator himself. Why ruin a final third act of the film with a reveal of the introduction of Wonder Woman? Why show the entirety of Rhino’s screen time IN A TRAILER? Seriously, all the footage used in the actual film is on there. The trailer even ends EXACTLY like the film does; talk about a “You Damn Fools” moment. Why turn an iconic sci-fi protagonist to a bad guy, on top of going plot point for plot point as a method for a trailer? Nothing makes sense, except that nothing makes sense. Imagine being the leader that put the trailer together, submitting it for approval, and totally saying “Great jobs guys! They won’t know what hit ‘em!”. These are just some of the worst pickings as well, with many other trailers giving away a key factor in the film as a possible means of grabbing further attention, yet doing so at the opportunity cost of people going to see their film as well. It’s important to look and assess a trailer in its totality and see what you could remove. What could you keep for the actual film viewing? You want to divulge little snippets of the plot, sure, but just enough to keep the entire premise interesting enough for people to seek out and learn how it actually all goes together. Spoon-feeding a film via a 2 minute spoiler fest is not the way you want to generate anticipation.
The next point of discussion is tonality and music. The two can go hand-in-hand with one another, but they can definitely also be mutually exclusive. The tone of the trailer may set the mood of what the movie itself will replicate, and the music can elevate said tone into pristine levels of magnetism. A comedy film might incorporate a light atmosphere with correspondingly fun music to create an energetic atmosphere of humor. A horror film would utilize chilling sound effects coupled with an eerie score to showcase an environment of dread and agitation. A drama would have a boy in freezing water and a woman floating above to safety. You get the idea.
Two superb trailers that boost the energy of their film come to mind for me: Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch and Jonathan Liebesman’s Battle: Los Angeles. While mostly regarded as mediocre films for many who’ve seen either of the two (I personally will defend the Extended Uncut Version of Sucker Punch until I die though), their trailers are spectacular work.
With Battle: Los Angeles, the team utilized Icelandic music composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’ s “Sun’s Gone Dim,” a breathtakingly melancholic piece to create a mesmerizing disarray of a seemingly no-escape alien invasion. As the trailer progresses, the tone shifts from confusion to panic to genuine fear as shots of people learning about something happening turns to desperate fleeing that escalates as the volume of the song sharpens until a cut at maximum sound level. It’s truly a masterful trailer in establishing an otherwise typical sci-fi premise by means of instilling fear. In Sucker Punch’s first teaser trailer, it makes use of “The Crablouse” by Belgian electronic music group, an eclectic techno / acid house track that breaks the trailer into a continuous bombardment of various shots and colors, paving way to a movie revolving around heavy action sequences. From just a little over a minute of actual trailer footage, you get a small glimpse at the director of ‘300’ in his followup attempt of a crazy, visually kaleidoscopic project on escapism. The trailer works magically in that it’s fast, it’s relentless, it’s rightfully violent, it just comes at you left and right and doesn’t leave room for a thought other than ‘whoa, what just happened???’.
A final consideration for when examining a movie trailer is ultimately thinking to yourself, “how much is too much?”. Outside of college essays, we’re always taught that less is more, and in the case of marketing films, it’s showing the least for most. I should copy write that one before it’s too late. Anyways, what I mean by that is how much can you show to someone to produce interest from them, and yet it is not enough to make them want to get MORE? In my opinion, one of the most perfect exemplifications of this in recent time is the Official Trailer #1 for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. I hope you’ve seen the film by now because if not then SPOILER ALERT: They go to space, dude. Well, that’s foretold in the trailer as well, but how much is shown is an extraordinary minimal amount.
The trailer is just a little over 2 minutes, and 3/4 of it (or 1 and a half minutes for you lowest common denominators), primarily focuses on Matthew McConnaughey’s character Cooper having dialogue exchanges with a few scientists and researchers on the current state of our planet. We find out that the planet is becoming inhabitable due to global crop blights and dust storms plaguing our food and way of life. We find out he has a family of his own, and he seems to at least care enough for the movie’s sake of having a good person as a lead (because how else would we emotionally invest in a film, right?). We then are finally told and shown in the last 30 seconds that him and his team are going on an intergalactic journey to somewhere unbeknownst to us at the moment. And that’s it. That’s all we have to work with. And yet it’s an absolutely brilliant setup for an otherwise 2 hour film that takes place in space, travels through a black hole, lands on a couple of planets where gravity hits wayyyyy different, and finds itself lost in a 4D tesseract of time and space. ‘Interstellar’s trailer is able to assemble plenty of goosebumps, thrills, eye-openers, and genuine curiosity at its premise without even showing more than 30 seconds of its main two acts. Take that in comparison to other movie trailers you might recall and how much they give away for the sake of making you think “ooh, this might be a good one.” It’s not. It’s really not.
With everything said, I’m no wizard on movie trailers. I’m not even a wizard in general (I’m more of a lightsaber kinda guy). But, with enough time watching trailers from my laptop, the theater, and hell, even the 2000s “Coming Soon to DVD” iconic message, you can surely analyze a thing or two. Learning about marketing in general helps as well. I enjoy spreading a little wisdom or insight when I can, and it’s in my interest that now going forward others can have a little more fun when watching a preview. I’m the one in the group to tell people I want to get to the movie before it starts to see the trailers, and it sure does add to the fun of seeing the movie I’m there for afterwards. If you got some enjoyment or picked up on a marketing tactic or two out of this, then I’m glad to be of service. Always remember: if you ever stop and think to yourself ‘is this trailer maybe showing a bit much?,’ then yes, it probably, most likely, another adverb here, is indeed showing too much.
