How trail­ers changed the way we watch movies

Time was, trail­ers were short pro­mos that played before the main fea­ture, designed to whet the appetite for com­ing attrac­tions. They were a key part of the cin­e­ma expe­ri­ence, some­times offer­ing enter­tain­ment on a par with the film you’d paid to see. But at some point trail­ers became an event in them­selves. In the ear­ly ​’90s stu­dios start­ed por­tion­ing off large chunks of their mar­ket­ing bud­gets to cre­ate trail­ers that were films in their own right. The first teas­er for Juras­sic Park fea­tured a sce­nario where a crea­ture trapped in amber con­tain­ing dino DNA is exam­ined under a micro­scope – a scene nev­er intend­ed for use in the film itself. Then Godzil­la stomped into view with a stand­alone trail­er that evoked Steven Spielberg’s smash hit while bom­bas­ti­cal­ly (and false­ly, as it turned out) proph­esy­ing its own success.

Two decades lat­er, trail­ers have become their own art­form – as eager­ly antic­i­pat­ed and wide­ly con­sumed as the movies they’re pro­mot­ing. So how did we get here?

The cur­rent cli­mate echoes Hol­ly­wood in the ear­ly ​’70s, when the major film stu­dios were sub­sidiaries of oth­er busi­ness con­cerns. Gulf and West­ern acquired Para­mount due to the fact that cel­lu­loid was a byprod­uct of oil pro­duc­tion, thus ensur­ing a mar­ket for their prod­uct. Time Warn­er had a vest­ed inter­est in the films released by their pro­duc­tion arm, Warn­er Bros, due to oth­er pub­lish­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. And at that same moment Colum­bia Pic­tures, which had been around for almost 50 years but was on its last legs, was saved by the suc­cess of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind, which was presold into cin­e­mas on the back of the mas­sive expec­ta­tion gen­er­at­ed by Jaws.

Big films weren’t always suc­cess­ful though. Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino’s huge and com­pli­cat­ed west­ern, killed off Unit­ed Artists, a stu­dio cre­at­ed by Char­lie Chap­lin, Lil­lian Gish and Dou­glas Fair­banks in the ​’20s to pro­mote artis­tic endeav­our in the face of com­mer­cial greed. We now have a sit­u­a­tion where Para­mount is owned by Via­com, Colum­bia belongs to Sony and Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry Fox is part of Fox Enter­tain­ment Group. The real­i­ty today is that the films them­selves are an after­thought in a world where data and how it trav­els is the pri­ma­ry con­cern of Hol­ly­wood mon­ey people.

Stu­dios know that audi­ences respond to inter­net buzz and con­jec­ture, and they fuel this by drip-feed­ing infor­ma­tion months – some­times years – ahead of a film’s release. Today’s block­busters are made by a com­mit­tee of mil­lions, a trend that is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to have tak­en flight in 2006 with the Samuel L Jack­son vehi­cle Snakes on a Plane. The com­bi­na­tion of title and star cre­at­ed a feed­back loop of hype, requir­ing the pro­duc­ers to adapt the prod­uct for an audi­ence that was yet to see any actu­al footage. Teas­er trail­ers are foren­si­cal­ly dis­sect­ed and scru­ti­nised by online com­men­ta­tors, and film­mak­ers rou­tine­ly include hints and east­er eggs to stoke fan engage­ment. The four-year ges­ta­tion of Bat­man V Super­man: Dawn of Jus­tice was con­stant­ly dogged by rumour and spec­u­la­tion. What hap­pened to turn­ing up and tak­ing your chances?

There’s a great anec­dote about Robert Zemeck­is and Steven Spiel­berg argu­ing with Sid Shein­berg dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of Back to the Future. The sto­ry goes that Shein­berg felt Doc Brown should have a mon­key as a pet, not a dog, because accord­ing to his research that’s what a mad sci­en­tist would have. Why? The whole point is that Doc was the crazy guy in town who believed in some­thing intan­gi­ble and went to great mea­sures to prove it. A pet mon­key would have reaf­firmed his sta­tus as the local odd­ball. A pet pooch with a sil­ly name effec­tive­ly makes the same point. The film­mak­ers stuck to their guns and Ein­stein was the first dog to time travel.

The ​’90s saw a whole host of super­hero movies – Dark­man, Spawn, The Phan­tom, Mys­tery Men – released to mod­est fan­fare owing to the feel­ing that they had a ready audi­ence wait­ing to con­sume them. Grad­u­al­ly the stu­dios realised that even this built-in fan­base need­ed to feel heard. In 1999 Ain’t It Cool News was a key fac­tor in push­ing The Blair Witch Project to a world­wide gross of $248m. Almost overnight, the stu­dios realised they could not longer ignore the fans who were already look­ing to dif­fer­ent screens to tell them which movies they should see. Giv­en that the trail­er for Paul Feig’s all-female Ghost­busters recent­ly became the most dis­liked non-music video on YouTube, it now seems impos­si­ble for any big pro­duc­tion to avoid the intense glare of fan scrutiny.

So, how to progress? Leg­endary Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­er Robert Evans was respon­si­ble for giv­ing Para­mount auton­o­my beyond its oil sub­sidiary sta­tus. He did so in an era when stu­dios were sim­i­lar­ly pan­der­ing to audi­ence expec­ta­tions – mak­ing a trail­er for the board of direc­tors to sell the idea that telling a big­ger sto­ry would result in a greater audi­ence share and increased prof­it. The result: an incen­di­ary auto­bi­og­ra­phy and a doc­u­men­tary adap­ta­tion, The Kid Stays in the Pic­ture.

A good trail­er shouldn’t give away the entire plot. It’s an amuse-bouche. It should entice and excite us, not make us feel like eas­i­ly exploitable con­sumers. The great B‑movie pro­duc­er Roger Cor­man used to let his direc­tors make what­ev­er the hell they want­ed, so long as they gave him enough bare flesh and explo­sions to fill a 90-sec­ond teas­er. He knew that cheap tit­il­la­tion was a sure way to sell a film, but he also cared about how each of his films was sold. Now, with trail­ers grow­ing ever big­ger, brash­er and more hyper­bol­ic, it seems the movies them­selves have some­how got­ten smaller.