How leak cul­ture gave rise to spoil­er-heavy trailers

When Dooms­day turned up in the final act of Bat­man V Super­man: Dawn of Jus­tice, were you sur­prised? Chances are you weren’t, giv­en that his cre­ation had already been detailed in a jar­ring, hasti­ly-edit­ed mon­tage shoved in at the end of the third offi­cial trail­er, which also revealed that a movie pitched as an epic show­down between America’s great­est super­heroes would end with them becom­ing Super Friends.

This may just seem like typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood – movie trail­ers are known for their inabil­i­ty to keep secrets, despised as much as they are devoured – but this was Warn­er Bros being reac­tive rather than pur­pose­ly ruinous. Rumours that Dooms­day was going to make an appear­ance in Zack Snyder’s block­buster first sur­faced in July 2014 and by the fol­low­ing May had been con­firmed by a wealth of sources.

A sim­i­lar thing hap­pened with Ter­mi­na­tor Genisys ear­li­er in 2015. A ver­sion of the script had leaked online in Feb­ru­ary and, despite not get­ting as much trac­tion as the Supes slay­er, Para­mount still felt com­pelled to release a trail­er that gave up the mid-point twist that John Con­nor was now the chief robot antagonist.

This is an unfor­tu­nate byprod­uct of leak cul­ture, a sub­set of the online film jour­nal­ism spec­trum where the goal isn’t to analyse exist­ing movies or new releas­es, but to dis­cov­er and reveal every detail of future projects, typ­i­cal­ly super­hero films or oth­er geek prop­er­ties. Using insid­er con­nec­tions, set leaks and oth­er nefar­i­ous means, entire sites exist sole­ly to uncov­er spoil­ers. In a rel­a­tive­ly short space of time, these sites have shak­en up the film indus­try. Because while much of the dis­cus­sion takes place with­in spe­cif­ic fan bases (mak​ingstar​wars​.net post­ed a sus­pi­cious­ly accu­rate plot sum­ma­ry of the heav­i­ly guard­ed The Force Awak­ens sev­en months pri­or to release, but implored read­ers to keep it qui­et), the activ­i­ty of these sub­cul­tures has start­ed to seep into the mainstream.

Take the recent teas­er for Rogue One: A Star Wars Sto­ry, which was con­firmed to con­tain ​“rumours” about the film’s plot. Those weren’t real­ly rumours, they were leaks that had been pur­pose­ly seed­ed to grow beyond their orig­i­nal source. This, along with ama­teur set pho­tos reg­u­lar­ly mak­ing head­lines, makes it clear that leak cul­ture is now an essen­tial com­po­nent of the Hol­ly­wood hype machine.

What’s fas­ci­nat­ing is that – for the most part – the stu­dios aren’t in con­trol. A care­ful­ly planned six month mar­ket­ing cam­paign will typ­i­cal­ly be designed to tease out infor­ma­tion, stills and actu­al footage, but all that becomes redun­dant if major details of the film’s plot are already online. Of course, both Bat­man V Super­man and Ter­mi­na­tor Genisys had big­ger prob­lems than their trail­ers, but the fla­grant dam­age con­trol cer­tain­ly didn’t help. Yet there is a cer­tain twist­ed log­ic at play here: when you acquire a piece of infor­ma­tion about a film by illic­it means, it can feel like a poten­tial­ly ruinous spoil­er, but when the offi­cial mar­ket­ing is the source it seems as if it’s been sanc­tioned by the filmmaker.

For stu­dios, authen­ti­cat­ing leaks is the less­er of two evils, but is it real­ly a solu­tion? The biggest irony here is that the prob­lem seems to stem not from fans search­ing for spoil­ers, but from stu­dios not being agile enough to adapt to the social media age. The pri­ma­ry func­tion of trail­ers is to tease and con­di­tion audi­ences to always be excit­ed for more. All leaks and spoil­ers do is pro­vide a quick­er, cheap­er alter­na­tive to wait­ing and buy­ing a ticket.

You can’t sim­ply digi­tise old fash­ioned tac­tics by crop­ping a poster for Twit­ter or releas­ing a 15-sec­ond teas­er a cou­ple of days before the full-length trail­er and expect things to stay the same. Two months after the Dooms­day deba­cle, Warn­er Bros addressed the fan back­lash with a ​“Final Trail­er” that removed all men­tion of the mon­ster and put the focus back on the tit­u­lar fight. Wouldn’t you know, it was bet­ter received by spoil­er lovers and haters alike.