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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.
If only there were tornados that attacked these trailers...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
A studio is afraid to try something new because a movie costs millions, often hundreds of millions, to make. So they are afraid to try something out of the ordinary and instead rehash the same stuff that once managed to get people into the cinemas, we get reboot after reboot, relaunch after relaunch.
And going to see a movie costs between 10 and 20 bucks a person. So we're afraid to try something that we don't know anything about, fearing that we're going to waste 20 bucks on something we are not going to enjoy.
It's a matter of money. People don't want to waste it on something that's not going to perform the way they would like it to.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They tend to give away too much, or, in a bad movie, show the only things worth watching. If I'm going to get suckered in to see it, I might as well save those five good jokes.
It really helped when I cut cable, because I barely see any these days, other than previews before other movies.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Why would you since they so often contain spoilers? What kind of idiot wants to ruin a movie just to find out something a little earlier?
>Our increasing obsession with trailers is changing how we watch movies.
Your obsession. I don't have an obsession with trailers. They barely register on my personal radar of things I'm aware of and they certainly aren't something I care about.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
We're not the ones making the trailers, and we're not the ones making the crappy movies. Not our fault.
We're fine with suspense and surprise. And, I'm pretty sure we're just fine with... *read slowly* GOOOD MOOOOVIES. So, make them good.
sig: sauer
The trailer showed Neo stopping bullets with his mind. In the trailer.
That was supposed to be the shock and awe moment that tied it all together.
There should be a new category.... Spoiler Trailer.
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
Sometimes the trailer is better than the movie.
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?"
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.
The recent "prologue trailer" for Alien Covenant is worse. Look away now if you haven't seen the film and don't want spoilers.
It literally has nothing to do with the film - I have no idea what actually happened, but Noomi Rapace (Elizabeth Shaw from Prometheus) basically doesn't appear in the full film, all her scenes are in the "prologue trailer", and the film itself goes off in a totally different direction. The "prologue trailer" hypes you up for the coming story and then ... nothing. That story isnt told. They tell a different story.
There is basically a film missing between Prometheus and Covenant.
While there may be some truth that we prefer to know the movie genre ahead of time (begetting genres themselves), the idea that we're afraid of being pleasantly surprised is asinine. We almost never are, that is the problem. Absolutely no effort is made to hook us in with a genre, and deliver us with more than we expect, at best we get a marketing checklist of included sequences. It makes a bit of sense then that audiences will at least decide which spreadsheet they wish to be party to, verify their assumption via trailer, and then commit $20+ to see the thing. $20 will get you substantially more hours of (and usually better) entertainment for the dollar than a movie theater, you have to be convinced that at least you won't hate it.
Or, we stream it on something for $5, or get it via Netflix DVD or Redbox and toss it back when the nausea subsides.
The movie industry is failing itself, blaming millions of people for not appreciating it isn't good thinking. I personally think the movie industry would do way better with a $10M budget cap and some creativity, rather than $150M explosionfests and absolutely no creativity at all.
In many (but not all) movies, spoilers aren't a huge deal. Are we really surprised that Captain America beats the bad guy at the end? Seeing two seconds of the final fight in the trailer doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy watching the entire movie. You could make the argument that the issue is that modern movies are shallow or dumb. Maybe, but I think this also applies to classic movies. Citizen Kane's "Rosebud" has been so endlessly parodied that someone sitting down to watch Citizen Kane for the first time is not going to be surprised at that revelation. They'll still enjoy a finely crafted story. Except for mystery stories, I don't think surprise is a primary factor in enjoying most movies.
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.
You sure it's not the garbage story lines that Hollywood keeps repeating that are making movies worse? How many times are they going to rewrite superhero story lines or the same boring "boy meets girl who he isn't really supposed to be in love with" plot line
Sent from my TARDIS
Back in the 1970s, you either paid for a movie ticket to see a movie, or waited 3-5 years for it to show up on TV at an indeterminate time, with commercials interspersed, and with unknown editing.
Today, if you don't pay for a ticket, you can catch it on pay per view in a couple months, or rent it on Blu-ray/DVD/streaming, or watch it on a pay movie channel, or stream it from a service you already pay for like Netflix, or wait a couple years for it to show up on TV, or pirate it.
In the face all that new competition, the logical thing to do is to lower movie ticket prices to make the theater experience more attractive. Instead, studios and theaters have done the opposite and raised ticket prices. I don't mind seeing the occasional bad movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime, or HBO because I'm already paying for those services. The only thing I lose is 90-120 minutes of my time (and that's only if I choose not to stop watching before the movie finishes). With a theater ticket I lose my money as well as my time. So I don't think it's at all surprising that people are holding theater movies to a higher standard than in the past. The studios need adapt to how technology has changed in the last 50 years - lower ticket prices, or improve the ratio of good to bad movies.
the money matters a bit but the hugest investment is time.
This why I prefer Netflix. If five minutes into a movie, it is obvious that it sucks, I can just switch to another. In the theater, that is much harder to do, especially if I am with other people.
all the trailers in a single place, like a park. We could call it a trailer park.
Apparently, it's gotten so bad that even when it's different, it's the same.
This is supposedly the book that ruined hollywood...
This book took the history of three-act blockbuster movies and distilled movie making into a minute-to-minute movie formula (a beat sheet) for future amateur screen writers. Apparently, the author died in 2009 (the book was published in 2005) so he probably didn't know how bad it would become and can't even repent...