Movie Trailers or Movie Failures?

Movie trailers are one of the newest forms of commercial within the advertising business. Right behind literary and print ads, movie trailers made their mark in the twentieth century, introducing a new form of entertainment as well as advertising.

Back then, trailers were short snippets of feature length films that showed very little of the plot, its characters, settings, in order to ‘tease’ the consumers into wanting more. It’s a perfectly efficient and potent way of advertising: it hooks audiences worldwide, only giving them a sample of what is to come and leaves them wanting for more entertainment. 

However, over the last few decades, trailers are not what they used to be. They employ the same amount of production and techniques to create them, but the effect is not as powerful as it once was.

 Movie trailers date back to the early twentieth century, many historians count the year 1913 to be the birth of trailers. To consider the evolution of trailers up to modern day, one must consider that trailer length, which would be about thirty seconds to two minutes, is the average viewing consumers took in. They would go to a theatre, pay their ticket and sit in a dark room with only one screen and view as much as they wanted. 

Nils Granlund, advertising manager for Marcus Loew’s theatres, produced a promotional viewing of a hit musical The Pleasure Seekers. Granlund would place these small promos in between the short films that are seen in theatres. This idea of promoting video spread from New York to Chicago where William Selig produced a small series, The Adventures of Kathlyn, which challenged viewers to return for another episode of the series. 

The term movie ‘trailer’ comes from having a title card at the end of a show that would invite consumers to return for more entertainment.

  The birth of the National Screen Service (1919) took hold on the ‘movie trailer’ business and became the king of the monopoly over the creation of movie trailers. The NSS would make the trailers and sell them directly to theatres. 

They continued their work right through Hollywood’s Golden Age of feature length films, often preserving their stylistic editing choices to promote the films: long description texts about the story, splicing of scenes, texts revealing the cast, and a narrator to top it all off. These were simple and straightforward, often at a couple minutes length, but they do not reveal much about the plot, only the things that could entice and seduce consumers to come and watch.

This all changed when auteur filmmakers turned the tide, for example Alfred Hitchcock, who would introduce one of his masterpieces (Psycho) as himself. He introduced the setting of Psycho himself, remarking on the serial killer story that surrounds it. Without the use of a voice-over narrator or the splicing of the actual film, Hitchcock managed to bring so many consumers to the box office, where he created (and continued to create) the most sinister films of all time, including, The Birds, Marnie, Vertigo, Rear Window, and more.

Stanley Kubrick is another example of redefining movie trailers. Kubrick introduced splicing and editing to a new creative level, debuting Dr. Strangelove as a confusing mix of title cards, text and visuals from the film. This was called a montage trailer. 

It leaves the audience confused and intrigued at the same time, still employing the use of hooking audiences. Filmmakers like Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick stretched the boundaries of creating the movie trailer without breaking the idea that there is something worth paying to see. They embody the purpose of entertainment within a few minutes of moving, visual pictures. It is one of the most successful strategies of advertising ever made.

An example of a successful advertising campaign would be to look at the wide release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Before 1975, films were released in big cities and then eventually spread out to smaller markets across the U.S., but advertising for Jaws created a big sensation that would lead to one of the biggest blockbusters in history. The entire idea of a wide release film was to get the most out of the advertising kick, which Universal Studios did at almost five hundred million worldwide.

The trailer for Jaws included a narrator and an underwater camera searching the depths of the ocean, leading up to an attack on a woman in the water. There was no plot, characters or setting introduced and yet Spielberg managed to encapsulate the entire film in thirty seconds and make the most profit out of it.

In relation to advertising, the competition in trailers is highly competitive now that the formats have reached to videogames and television. They have similar styles, promoting their product (shows and games) through a storytelling technique. It’s analogous with a book that you can visually and audibly hear, thus it is a very influential technique of advertising. What separates feature length films and the rest of the competition is the wide release strategy and the content that is being sold.

Movie trailers nowadays, in my opinion, follow the agenda of showing the most out of a film to get audiences to come. They use creative editing techniques, just like trailers before their time, however they show more content. This, I believe, has weakened the advertising strategies of movie trailers because when one shows more substantial content, the more I see, and the more I see, the less intrigued I become. 

Hitchcock’s personal introduction of Psycho is a perfect example of how to be mysterious enough to reel consumers in but also reveal the right amount of content for me to remember it. Compared to Marvel’s The Avengers, which displays only action sequences and the reveal of the entire plot and villain, I am not as inclined to watch a film where I can predict exactly what will happen. Of course there are a lot of factors to consider, but I am willing to spend more money on something that piques my interest than something that turns off the intrigue completely.

Another example of this would be to examine Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar trailer.

Based on personal experience, I tend to talk a lot while watching movies in the theatre and we all know that we have sat through the fifteen minutes of trailers for upcoming films. In the last ten years, I have said “Now I know what happens” after every trailer I have seen and it still happens today. I witness too much of a film, so much so that I can predict what will happen and immediately decide not to see it.

This is how much movie trailers have changed for me. In Nolan’s Interstellar, we are given clips of America’s history, with Matthew McConaughey narrating a monologue about how we are defined by mankind’s ability to overcome anything. We are shown vague clips of a bookshelf, a character in tears, a father and daughter holding hands and then we’re up in space among the stars. In two minutes, we are shown a little amount of content, but we are hooked because we want to know how it all fits together.

In contrast, with Michael De Luca’s Fifty Shades of Grey, we are shown so much content: the story, its characters, the problem between them and the fillers in between, that there’s no mystery behind it all. It’s compiled of clips of the two main characters and we are immediately thrown into their romance, and the obvious conflicts that it will involve.

Thus, one cannot be as interested because it seems very predictable and nothing new. I, personally, believe that this is a very weak trailer, and the only thing it is advertising is exactly what is in it. (Also, it has one of the most famous followings in the literary world of readers.)

To me, a movie trailer is all about getting an audience to relate to what’s been shown or to pique their interests in something that is different. In the last few decades, it seems as though trailers are made to attract, not to interest, consumers by releasing more substantial content.

It creates a lesser, weaker version of ‘call to action’, implying that the trailer makers do not trust the audience enough to see or buy the product so they result in showing more. One of the most important principles in advertising is to build around an audience and their interests, building a trust between advertisers and consumers in order to fulfill those needs.

Movie trailers are one of the most successful strategies of advertising because it holds so much content within a short amount of time: music, visuals, special effects, actors and actresses, editing, imagination, and more.

However, like everything else in advertising, there is always a weak point. For example, a jingle in a commercial is very repetitive, catchy and can make a consumer remember a product, but at the same time, it can create an annoyance and completely turn off a consumer’s interest in a second. 

It’s the same with trailers. When a trailer becomes more than two minute long, or a character takes off their mask to reveal they are the villain, or when an important part of the story is fluffed up, it can immediately turn off a consumer’s tie to the product. Showing less content, trusting the audience, and beefing the suspense of whether to see a film or not is what I believe to be the key component of a successful trailer.