We recently marked the thirtieth anniversary of Back To The Future. And in case you haven’t checked your Facebook feed recently, it’s also the year Marty McFly travels to at the beginning of Back To The Future Part II. I remember that was one of my first cinema experiences. When it was released, I had just fallen in love with going to the movies. My favorite part about the whole experience was before the movie started, watching the trailers. Getting a quick glimpse at movies recently finished, in production, or sometimes still in development. With all the best shots, stunts, and one-liners on display. And to my surprise- at the end of Back To The Future Part II, after a title card promised “To Be Concluded", there was a trailer for Back To The Future Part III, the final installment.
Almost twenty-six years later, trailers have only grown in popularity. We now have a website we can visit where anyone can upload digital footage they shot on their phone of a movie trailer that premiered at a comic convention. Six things in that sentence would have blown my 5-year old mind.
"Website? Digital footage? You have cameras on your phones? Trailer- you mean preview, right? They have premieres? Why would they show them at comic conventions?”
A quick search of YouTube this week yields hours of trailer video recently uploaded. Comic Con just finished and fans in attendance had their phones ready. They uploaded the latest trailers premiering and you can log on to see some of the shakiest, grainiest, poorly shot footage of a theatre screen- usually reversed because being a nerd doesn’t mean you know how to flip an image on your phone.
Those videos, collectively, received almost as many viewers and comments as the officially released trailers on studio controlled channels. Add to that, the trend of YouTube channels devoted solely to showing people watching trailers and making comments; if you haven’t heard about this YouTube craze until now, let me apologize for introducing you to another reason to hate the internet.
The market is saturated with more trailers than ever before. There are teasers, then first trailers, and then second trailers. There are trailers for tv shows now. Trailers for video games. Commercials made to look like trailers. Even political candidates have trailers.
It’s amazing how popular trailers have become when you think of how often fans on the internet cry “spoiler alert”. According to every forum you stumble upon, the greatest threat to people on the internet isn’t Anonymous, ISIS, or loneliness, it’s spoilers. Spread all the misinformation you want regarding history or politics, but don’t you dare post what happened to a fictional character from a TV program that aired last month without first saying “***SPOILER ALERT*****”.
But the trailer is a spoiler. Set photos, articles, comic con panels with big announcements- all spoilers. They might not spoil everything, but they spoil a lot of character and story details. They give away enough information to make fans speculate and make connections, ultimately drawing conclusions that may or may not end up being true in the final film, show, or comic. That’s what trailers are designed to do- to tease and titillate and answer some questions while sparking others.
Fans may say they hate spoilers, but certainly they love to be teased. They love having just enough to be able to talk about and to wonder and to dream about later on. They want to have something to discuss with their friends. And studios have perfected the right amount of information to give. Trailers are now a science. Loud music, big effects, familiar actors. Doing a sequel? Add just a taste of nostalgia with an old, beloved character. Doing a reboot? Do the exact opposite of the original. Unless the original was good, in which case copy it down to the letter and then double it.
One of the biggest trends for music in trailers right now is using covers of old hit songs but slowed down as if to have a new take. As if viewers will say, “Wow, I haven’t heard Who Let The Dogs Out in a while but Adele really puts a fresh spin on it."
But there is always one person who has to be the downer- “Well, you can’t judge the movie by the trailer.” Actually, hypothetical guy I just created, that’s the purpose of a trailer. You are supposed to judge the movie and decide if you want to see it or not. If a movie has a trailer with predictable, low brow humor, and someone says “well, you have to see it- it’s funnier than the trailer makes it out to be.” That’s too bad. They should have put funnier jokes in the trailer.
If you’re like me, your Netflix has a queue longer than the lifeboats on the Titanic. Then HBO, Amazon, Hulu, and Crackle had to get into the mix. Humans only have 18 waking hours in the day, two of them shouldn’t be wasted on seeing if a film is really as bad as its advertisements make it appear. If the comedy looks to appeal to the lowest common denominator, I’m going to assume it’s for the Hangover crowd and not the In The Loop crowd. You can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but you can judge a book based on a page you read. Especially if it looks like that page was hastily copied and pasted from another book you hated.
This is how I know I am no longer that 5-year old kid at Back To The Future Part II. I don’t care about trailers anymore. They are only there for me to judge which movies I will definitely not give my time. Sadly, that’s most movies. Rarely do I find that there is a trailer that wants to separate itself from the pack. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not nostalgic for a time gone by. Some films I thought were great once I now realize are kind of terrible. And I’m not cynical about the current state of films. In many ways, movies have gotten much better and I’m optimistic about their future.
The problem I think is that we have so much content competing with other content drowning in a larger sea of other content, some of which is just commenting on other content. And the movie market has gotten to a place where it doesn’t so much care about the finished product it produces so much as it cares about how that product can be sold. The marketing of the film; the reactions to the trailers. That’s priority number one. Studios, like all businesses, don’t want to take risks. And things that are trending don’t seem like risks. A fan base doesn’t seem like a risk because the studio can basically sell the product before there is a product.
Before Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale completed their Back To The Future trilogy, they forced the studio to take a risk. The studio had to commit to making two sequels back-to-back, at the same time. That meant if Part II flopped, Part III would probably be an even bigger flop. The studios were not happy, but they conceded. They took a risk. It wasn’t a great risk, but by doing it this way, audiences were treated to a little surprise trailer at the end of Part II. And now studios commit to trilogies regularly. It’s not risky anymore. That’s why we got three Hobbit films shot together and now six new Star Wars films are in the pipeline.
It just makes me really sad to realize now that my Back To The Future trailer experience, one of my favorite memories from childhood, was the beginning of this new era in which we live. A era in which the trailer is king. Kids get to have my Back To The Future trailer experience everyday. It’s not special anymore. And there are more spoilers than ever now and very little risk taking in films. Maybe 5-year old me would enjoy this, but 30-year old me is bored.
