Our Obsession With Trailers Is Making Movies Worse (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader shares an article: Our increasing obsession with trailers is changing how we watch movies. We're becoming audiences afraid of surprise, audiences that would rather watch movies we're certain we'll like than risk watching films that surprise us into love. In some cases, this fixation is even lowering the quality of movies themselves by encouraging bad filmmaking habits. The most extreme example happened when Warner Bros released such a successful trailer for 'Suicide Squad' it brought on the company that cut it to edit the whole film -- dropping the director's original cut altogether. [...] Thanks to trailers' easy accessibility on YouTube and those shot-by-shot breakdowns that quickly appear online once trailers drop, anyone interested in a given flick can pore over all the available footage for hours -- even if that leads to major spoilers for them and everyone they share it with.

Comments

Movies are too expensive.

[DatbeDank]

When something costs me a lot of money, my expectations start to increase. When a movie costs $13+ for a single ticket, I expect that movie to be mind blowingly awesome. When it undoubtedly falls flat on its face for not living up to its $13 value to me, I feel ripped off and stop going to see movies that I don't feel were worth the $13 to me.

If movies cost, 6,7, or even 8 dollars, my expectations will be more reasonable and thus my enjoyment of the movie increases because i'm not asking myself, "Was this worth it?"

How long until there are only trailers?

[swb]

My 12 year old son will, at times, sit down in front of the Apple TV and watch nothing but trailers for an hour.

I'm wondering if the culprit isn't the short attention span syndrome, immediate gratification and the regular consumption of very short form videos on YouTube and the like.

Japanese trailers

[Rakarra]

This sounds like American film trailers are becoming more like Japanese film trailers. The trailers are often cut to tell much of the plot, and since there's more of a focus on the interests of Japanese women (as opposed to the obsession with American teen boys) they tend to add more emotion to the trailer itself. This is maybe most stark in the trailers for animated films which have a long history in Japan as adult fare, but are still often relegated to the animation ghetto in the USA.

Compare these two trailers for Inside Out. The American version focuses on slackstick humor, while the Japanese trailer kicks you right in the feels and isn't afraid to spoil the plot.

Also, the Trailers Always Spoil trope from TV Tropes is always a good read on this.

Re:I avoid trailers, if possible

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, it's more common these days to release content in the trailer, that will NOT be in the movie itself.

So plot lines which might be suggested in the trailer, won't exist in the movie. At best they're side-plots, and topics or characters which may exist in the directors cut, but they again only hint at a larger narrative that we won't actually get to see in the theater. I'm not sure many others notice this, but I certainly do, when in the event I do see the trailer, go to the movie, and notice content that isn't there. Maybe I'm an outlier...

So yea. Best to avoid trailers at this point. I'd rather be surprised during the hour and a half, than for 2 minutes of teaser.

Re:The worse part of a trailer...

[judoguy]

My oldest son is a trailer editor in Hollywood. It drives him crazy when the studios force him to promote the movies in certain ways. They'll often take his work and combine it with other trailer houses work to produce frankentrailers.

What I hear is that most, if not all, trailer editors are serious film geeks and would love to be able to do good work but the client always wins.

Here is a version of a trailer my son made on his own time and showed the client just to try and do something he could be proud of. The client loved it but then the client's marketing department made him tone it way back. It's not what he first wanted, but it's still pretty fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...