Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal battle it out in Gladiator II. The trailers for the film feel "tonally off". Photo / Paramount Pictures
ANALYSIS
Promos give away too much or too little or are misleading or don’t leave anything out. We could go on. But there are ways to fix them.
I know the trailer for David Fincher’s 2010 drama, The Social Network, by heart.
We hear the soft sounds of a young women’s choir singing Radiohead’s Creep as a montage of mundane Facebook interactions flashes across the screen. When the voices hit the lyric “you’re so very special,” the camera zooms out of a pixelated image to reveal the face of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg. It’s almost a minute in when footage from the actual movie starts to play and Zuckerberg chatters about wanting to get into Harvard final clubs. From there, it’s a quick escalation of tension that reaches a peak when Andrew Garfield strides on-screen screaming, “Mark!” That’s when the tagline appears: “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”
Just thinking about it, I get chills. The Social Network is a great movie. The Social Network trailer is also a great movie. It just happens to be only two minutes and 30 seconds long.
Movie trailers are, at their most basic level, marketing, of course. But they can also be so much more, little short films unto themselves, defined by excellent editing and the ability to create a feeling of thrilling anticipation. I love a great trailer, yet I can’t help feeling that there’s been a drought recently. And I’m not alone. My social media feeds are flooded with trailer-related complaints. (Currently one of the main targets is the trailer for Speak No Evil, which has been charged with showing the entire movie.)
With studios scrambling to fill theatres, they seem to be struggling to figure out what kind of trailers will draw audiences. Instead of taking chances, they are making creatively inert spots. There are trailers that give away too much (Trap), trailers that are disappointingly generic (A Quiet Place: Day One) and trailers that feel tonally off (Gladiator II). Mostly, no one is having any fun with them anymore.
Throughout Hollywood history, trailers have taken many forms. In the industry’s early days, the appeal to the audience was direct. The trailer for Citizen Kane spends about 30 seconds on a shot of a microphone descending while the director and star Orson Welles explains in voice-over that “what follows is supposed to advertise our first motion picture”.
As Hollywood became more experimental, some trailers did as well. Stanley Kubrick’s promos for Dr. Strangelove (1964) and A Clockwork Orange (1972) are beloved for their collagelike qualities, which convey the films’ sensations while revealing very little.
Starting in the 1980s and extending through the early 2000s, trailers were dominated by the booming voice-overs of men like Don LaFontaine and Hal Douglas, whose low, authoritative sounds conferred a distinctive gravitas. LaFontaine, known as the “voice of God,” was credited with coming up with the oft-mocked phrase “in a world”— like “in a world that’s powered by violence” — used to advertise everything from The Road Warrior (1981) to South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999). LaFontaine once explained in an interview that the line was conceived as an easy shortcut: “You very rapidly set the scene.”
Historically, trailers haven’t always been so expository. The one for Alien (1979) is commonly regarded as among the best of all time, a mood-setting marvel that begins by nearly silently travelling through the vastness of space, before revealing the ominous image of an egg. The terror is palpable in quick cuts as the camera moves through the ship with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley. An out-of-context image of the cat Jonesy baring his teeth only adds to the tension. You never see what is causing all the chaos.
Perhaps the ultimate question when it comes to trailers is how much to give away. Voice-over makes it easy to dole out just the amount of information you need; as Hollywood has moved away from that tactic, striking the perfect balance can be difficult.
For the most part the spot for M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is excellent. It quickly establishes the basic premise – a girl and her father are attending a pop star’s arena tour – but there’s something sinister at hand. An eager merch salesman explains why something feels amiss: the entire concert is a trap for a serial killer known as “the Butcher”. From there the spot goes right ahead and explains just who this murderer is: the goofy dad played by Josh Hartnett, who checks on his victim through an app on his phone.
Now, of course, revealing that gives the trailer a perfect button to end on, Hartnett’s smiling face turning into a menacing grimace. The problem isn’t the revelation that Hartnett is not playing a good guy – that’s the entire premise of the movie – but did we need to see the full evidence of his misdeeds? Couldn’t there have been some mystery to what that look actually means?
A Quiet Place: Day One didn’t seem very interesting based on the trailers, in part because they didn’t share much information about the characters or the story at all. The promos indicated that the movie was a prequel to A Quiet Place, and that Lupita Nyong’o dodges aliens who hunt via sound in New York City. But the spots included few other examples of tone or performance. The actual movie came as a surprise. Amid the chaos, director Michael Sarnoski had found a touching drama about a woman with cancer who finds the will to survive just a little longer. By flattening out the narrative, the trailer made the film less appealing.
You don’t need to show us the whole darn thing. This isn’t about revealing a twist, it’s about giving us what feels like an abbreviated beat-by-beat account of the entire runtime. See the trailer for The Fall Guy, well over three minutes of set pieces that leave very little to the imagination. Not only do we get a full explanation of the premise – fine, whatever – we also get glimpses of how it plays out. For a movie about a stuntman, one would think they’d want to wait to show us some of the bigger stunts.
Meanwhile, the trailer for the James McAvoy-starring Speak No Evil – a remake of the 2022 Danish film – explicitly shows how what seems like a social drama about two families becoming entwined on vacation turns into a horror story. (Though, it should be noted, it doesn’t reveal the truly upsetting ending of the original.)
Every issue you can have with a trailer seems to stem from a misinterpretation of what audiences want. Take the recent trend of movie musicals trying to hide the fact that they are movie musicals, even though it turns out movie musicals do pretty well at the box office.
Yet even Wicked – Wicked of all things! – has bought into the idea that musicals need to be disguised. You can hear snippets of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo belting songs like Popular and Defying Gravity, but you never see them actually perform those songs. As a devoted fan, all I want to see is how these two tackle their numbers.
Music in general can be a particular hurdle for trailers. While the Creep needle drop worked for The Social Network, it’s gotten to the point that hearing a slow version of a popular song draws eye-rolls. Sony Music Publishing marketing chief Brian Monaco has called the practice “trailerising,” designed specifically to make audiences perk up their ears in recognition. They might not be focused on the promo, he told Variety in 2021, but when they hear the chorus, “they go, ‘Wait, I know this song.’ They start paying attention, and now they’re watching the trailer.’”
The first trailer for the legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice kicks off with a somber interpretation of Harry Belafonte’s Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), used so memorably in the 1988 original when the Deetz family and their dinner guests are possessed to dance. The familiarity of that music, however, is a bug, not a feature: all it does is imply that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is going to be a less-fun rehash. The second Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trailer is much more exciting in part because it’s scored to the propulsive sounds of the Bee Gees’ Tragedy.
It’s not always a lethargic tune that can undo a trailer. In the first look at Gladiator II, sword fights were set to Kanye West and Jay-Z’s No Church in the Wild, presumably to highlight the lyric “blood stains the Colosseum doors” as the Colosseum flashes on-screen. The anachronism isn’t the problem, it’s that the choice comes across as an outdated plea for relevancy. Not only is the rapper now known as Ye persona non grata thanks to his antisemitic remarks, but No Church in the Wild was already used anachronistically in the trailer for 2012′s The Great Gatsby. Been there, done that.
There’s no easy solution to the trailer problem, but I have a couple of suggestions.
Let trailers be corny again: Give into the hokeyness of Orson Welles proudly introducing his film. Do a voice-over. If you’re at a loss, go with the classics, but do so with earnestness, not cynicism.
Let them be creative: Cast trends aside and use images that make people lean in instead of saying, ‘Huh, I’ve seen this one before.’” Forget the slow songs. Consider a fast one instead.
And most of all, make them honest: Capture the actual mood of the film you’re trying to sell. You don’t have to spoon-feed us information, but you should give a sense of what’s to come. It is a “coming attraction,” after all.
Think of that Social Network trailer. Before seeing it I was sceptical that a film about the invention of Facebook could be at all interesting. After? I was sold on this bizarrely entrancing tech thriller with a haunted overtone. That’s movie magic.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Esther Zuckerman
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.