Movie Trailers - Are they ruining movies?

One of the issues i see, too, is they decide to start the marketing X months ahead of time. So, if trailer 1 drops (teaser or not) 12 months out, they kick out 4-5 or more trailers in that time. Then you get an additional 4-5 TV spots.

They simply put too much out there. Part of that is stupidity like BvS. Only a moron spends 250M to make a flick and 250M more to market it before it's shown once. They go desperate and advertise the @#$% out of it and give away too much. I don't recall if that gave out too much ahead of time or not, but, the went way overboard on the marketing because they were afraid to lose money and wound up doing worse.

The point of a trailer is to generate interest. Not to give things away. There's a line in there where it crossed from enough to too much. The line is crossed the vast majority of the time these days. Don't put out the trailer too early if you trying to keep interest going. It's hard to keep it going 12 months with a single trailer.

Marketing execs seem to think people love ads and they don't. A little can go a long ways.
 
Remember the "Southpaw" trailer?
It showed the whole movie. Every beat, from beginning to end.
I still haven't seen that movie, because I don't need to. I saw the trailer.
 
Not really anything substantial to add, but like the OP said, the trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody was fantastic. It's probably the best trailer I've seen for a movie in the last ten years.
 
I'll watch a teaser and thats it. Not too long ago thats all we got! I remember just 10 years ago when The Dark Knight teaser dropped and it was just the bat symbol and the Joker's laugh. I was SO excited. Now I feel like we just see too much.
 
I usually watch one teaser and maybe, MAYBE one trailer. After that I avoid all the rest because they love showing half of a film before it's even released. I just want to see the movie when I see it.
 
I hate when trailers use music that is not of the era the movie is depicting. The most egregious example is this trailer for, The Artist. The movie is about the death of the silent picture era, and the birth of talkies. It covers the years from 1927-32, but the song they play over the trailer was not even written 'til several years later. That may not sound like too much of a stretch, but it was! Because the song is Benny Goodman performing Louis Prima's, "Sing, Sing, Sing". And it is THE song which ushered in a whole new style of music (Swing), when Benny recorded it in 1937. It's akin to watching a WWII picture, with an Elvis song on the soundtrack.

Actually, I don't even know if the song is in the movie. And I'm not going to find out, because I'm so turned off by its use in the trailer. If any of you have seen the movie, please tell me, however, as I am curious. Here's the infamous trailer. Sing, Sing, Sing is the first song you hear, and is again played later in the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8K9AZcSQJE

BLECH!!!

The Wook

I compared this to Elvis and WWII, in my above post. Another hypothetical comparable example would be a picture about soldiers coming home from Vietnam in 1973, and hearing on the film's soundtrack The Sugarhill Gang's, Rapper's Delight. In 1979, it was the first rap/hip-hop song to break the Top 40 Billboard Chart, and ushered in that genre of music, much like Sing, Sing, Sing did for swing music over 4 decades in the past. Six years earlier, rap/hip-hop did not exist. Just like swing music had not even been born in the time period of The Artist.

Is no one else outraged by this trailer for The Artist?!?!

The Wook
 
I know this is off-topic, but while on the subject of using music appropriately / inappropriately, one of my biggest complaints comes from Terminator 2 (the movie, not the trailer). When I first saw the trailer (which was actually on a VHS for another movie I had rented. I was in High School and had no idea the movie was even coming out, I wasn't connected then like I am now), I was super excited. I had a hunch the Terminator might be good in that film, but wasn't entirely sure.

So when I saw the movie and the scene in the bar comes up where he takes the biker's motorcycle and clothes. he's about to drive away when the other guy comes out and fires a round from the shotgun. Terminator gets off the bike, swipes the shotgun, and takes the guy's sunglasses. He gets back on the motorcycle and "Bad To The Bone" by George Thorogood and the Destroyers comes on. It was at that very moment I knew he was good, and I was pissed! They ruined that reveal, the suspense, with a big slice of stinky Linburger cheese! I couldn't believe it, why? It would have been awesome to keep the audience in suspense until the very moment he grabs John Connor and shields him from T-1000.

Sorry to get longwinded, but since we're talking about music, I wanted to provide an example (there are many) of how they get it wrong and it just kills the vibe.
 
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Wasn't the tagline for T2 "This time he's back for good?" Didn't that kind of give it away?

No clue, I've never see or heard of that tagline. The only exposure I had to T2 was the one trailer on VHS, then I never saw anything else until the movie came out. And if I'm not mistaken, that trailer was purposely edited as to not give it away that he was good. Even so, they made a point when the movie started to not reveal that, kept it suspenseful right up until that moment. I just personally didn't like how it was revealed.
 
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has spoiled more in its trailers and publicity videos than any reading I have done about the film. Part of me enjoys being spoiled on everything because I purposefully want to know what happens...But if I am trying to remain relatively spoiler free, then it does bum me out to see something I would have preferred to have experienced in the theater. Case in point, I watched YouTube a few nights ago with my girlfriend, they played an unskipable trailer in front of the video, and I saw something in the film that would have made a better in-context surprise that a quick snippet.
 
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