Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
It could be worse. They could all be Hallmark movies.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
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.