By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | November 29, 2023 |
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | November 29, 2023 |
At a recent cinema trip, I saw the trailer for One Life, a biopic based on the story of Nicholas Winton. During the late 1930s, the British stockbroker visited Czechoslovakia and helped form plans to assist in the rescue of hundreds of Jewish children on the eve of the Second World War. Winton’s story became national news in the ’80s, when he appeared on the BBC programme That’s Life! and was surprised to be reunited with dozens of those who he helped move to Britain.
To this day, you see the clip of him meeting these people for the first time a lot online and in inspirational series. It’s truly moving, and Winton’s story is an immense one. It’s no surprise someone wanted to make it into a film with Sir Anthony Hopkins in the lead role. What did surprise me, however, was how the trailer detailed all of this and spoiled that big reveal. It was like a Wikipedia synopsis of the entire film in less than two minutes, right down to the teary-eyed surprise of Winton on national TV. Call me cynical, but I can’t imagine watching the trailer for One Life and feeling like there was anything else you needed to see. Why bother with the rest of the film now?
This trend is increasingly becoming the norm in modern film marketing. There are no surprises anymore. Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film that exists mostly to offer a slew of Marvel Easter eggs, showed its hand in its trailers, showing off cameos that should have been kept secret for audiences. Biopics are particularly notorious for this, with the most formulaic examples of an already rote genre packing in all the important beats just in case you worried they’d forget about, say, Bob Marley being shot. I can’t say that any of these trailers hyped me up for the film. Really, I just felt like I could pre-emptively tick them off my list and move on.
The basic purpose of a trailer is, duh, to build up hype. That goes without saying. It’s Marketing 101, to entice a previously unaware audience into being excited about your product. Sometimes, you have to really sell it, pushing something without the benefit of pre-existing hype as exists for many a franchise entry. You can cut out a lot of establishing stuff in, say, the latest Marvel movie trailer because the assumption is that general audiences who have kept up with over a decade of content won’t need their hands held. Even that, however, is not guaranteed, especially when you’re introducing ever more characters and unfamiliar faces. The recent run of MCU titles have shown that audience investment is not guaranteed as the franchise moves further into a new phase devoid of its most beloved characters.
Trailers are meant to offer up the money shots, so to speak. That means the action scenes, the shouting actors, maybe some sexy times. If you’re selling a wannabe Oscar winner, you have to show off those performers getting their nominee reels ready. For a horror film, you put in some jump scares. It’s a sale of product, a sign to the potential ticket-buyer that what they see is what they’ll get. That’s assuming the trailer is honest, of course. We’ve all been burned by a trailer that changes the tone or even the genre of the entire movie because it was either too difficult to encapsulate the truth or the studio worried that nobody would want the actual thing. Remember when the Suicide Squad trailers went from grimdark and mean to neon carnage and jokey? Then again, that example was more representative of a changing narrative thanks to harried reshoots and editing room drama, but the basic practice is more frequently seen outside of superhero stuff.
It doesn’t take much for a trailer to tip from hints into full reveals. If the film isn’t very good or is more languidly paced than we’re told mainstream audiences desire, the trailer will pad things out with those big moments as a hook, even if it gives everything away. This has, for many viewers, become an indicator that the film is not very good. That’s not a blanket attitude, of course, but there’s a reason such trailers feel off to many of us.
But it’s clearly a practice that works. Trailers are shown to test audiences and recut depending on what those people find the most appealing about the teasers. Way back in 2015, an Entertainment Weekly piece quoted Matt Brubaker, president of theatrical at Trailer Park, the agency that edits many major film trailers. ‘As much as people complain that trailers give away too much, nine times out of 10, the more of the plot you give away, the more interest you garner from the audiences. Audiences respond to the trailers with more of the movie.’
The process is one of intense familiarity, to the point where AI software has been developed to feed an entire movie into the machine and create easily marketable trailers based on test screening scores. If there’s one thing Hollywood loves more than tedious predictability, it’s when they can create that without having to pay an actual human to do it. There’s zero innovation or artistry to this, something that the best trailers often embody while simultaneously doing their job of basic promotion. But those striking trailers we remember months after seeing them are the exception to the rule. Artistry is accidental here (as it so often is for studios when it comes to the movie-making process as a whole.)
Going to the cinema is expensive, more so now than ever. People are generally going to the movies less, particularly in the post-lockdown era when staying at home with Netflix is an easier and cheaper option. Even those capital E Event movies aren’t pulling in viewers like they used to, so imagine how arduous it is to get people to pay attention to mid-budget dramas, indie films, and anything that can’t easily be categorized by genre or demographic. For studios, it’s just safer to show their hand and hope that audiences want to see it again but on a bigger screen. Even if audiences feel tricked by the trailer or deflated that there were no new surprises, who cares? They got those butts in the seats and the grosses are adding up. We all love a mystery, but just as often, we want to know exactly what we’re getting. Oh, the One Life trailer gives away the emotional climax? At least you’ll know when to cry.