Movie Trailers - Are they ruining movies?

I'm not talking about giving away major plot points or spoilers, but are trailers so well put together these days that it's hard for the movie to live up to the expectation? I just watched the Bohemian Rhapsody trailer and it looks fantastic, and I got to thinking, can the movie be that good? I mean I still get chills watching The Last Jedi trailer even now knowing that movie was an incredible disappointment for me. To be honest.........The Last Jedi completely ruined trailers for me,

Some trailers look great, and the movie is great; some look great and the movie sucks; and some suck and the movie is awesome. I think I prefer trailers to be "blah", that way I walk in and if it's good, it's a pleasant surprise. If it's bad, well then no harm.

But in all seriousness, I get it. I know that's not how you make money in this industry. You need hype, anticipation, intrigue, positive energy, etc, to draw crowds. I guess I could stop watching trailers altogether, but I don't want to do that.

I love watching movies, but lately, I feel as vulnerable as fawn looking for it's mother on a stormy day. Am I the only one who feels this way?

Yes, no, maybe.

Movie Trailers - Are they ruining movies?

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For me, they most definitely were until I stopped watching them a number of years ago.

I pay almost no attention to trailers and frankly, the only thing ruining movies is the movies themselves.

I never watch more than the first trailer for any movie, teases just enough to get me interested, but doesn't give me enough to overhype or spoil it by giving away the whole plot.

When I tried college for a short time, back years ago, in my film class we had to give a presentation. I choose film trailers. But what I did was the opposite. I took Jurassic Park, which I find to be a great movie, and then tried to make a trailer which made it look bad to show the power a trailer can have.
I don't really remember how it went, but I do remember that I took the scene where they're all in the jeep looking up at the brachiosaurus, but it then cuts to the goat the raptors are about to eat.

I keep my expectations low, so I'm only disappointed half the time.

TazMan2000

Yes they are, and the last straw was Rogue One. (Actually I think it was a TV ad but still.) I avoid them for films I'm eagerly anticipating now.

Used to be, the trailer would show you an intriguing situation, but, cliffhanger-style, not show how it gets resolved. That's how teases should work. Go see the movie and see how it turns out.

Not any more. The payoffs of intense/actiony/comedic moments are now put in there, too.

The R1 example: somebody shoots a rocket at an AT-ACT head and it recovers relatively unharmed. Whoa! Nice tease in the early trailers.

Later, in a trailer and/or a TV spot, they added the arrival of the X-Wing that blows it up. BOO!! Save it for the stage! So now not only do we know the resolution of that tense moment, we also know when watching the movie that X-Wings are going to make it through the shield gate.

Totally with you on this one, especially when they mislead you. Case in point, did you see Downsizing? Holy crap what a flaming pile. It was bad, and not in an ironic Wicker Man with Nic Cage bad. If you watched the trailer it made it seem like a comedy with Matt Damon & Kristen Wiig.... Well, Kristen Wiig is in maybe 1/4 of the movie, and it definitely wasn't a comedy.

Suicide Squad is a different case of a trailer ruining the movie. When the first trailer was received so well (with the neon color graphics and rock anthems) the studio decided to give David Ayer's cut to the trailer house to let them have a pass at it. Well we all know how horrible that turned out.

This should really be entitled "How technology has changed the way trailers are made."

Once,a long long time ago, the only way to see a trailer was to go to the cinema. And that was it . You got one trailer, perhaps two closer to the release date. Then you when down to the pub with your mates and discussed what you could remember (which often wasn't too much or too accurate). Pre internet some new movie releases actually performed better at the box office BECAUSE of the trailer that was released with them. People PAID to see the trailer!!!

Post internet, well then its a totally different ball game. There are so many different viewing devices and choices , then there are the blogs and you tube channels that freeze frame and analyse the content and a huge hunger from the fandom that speculate which means the way a film is marketed and promoted has utterly changed.

Part of that has become " misdirection" , but thats always been the case. I can think of dozens of trailers that have been cut and editted so they look utterly brilliant (and the movies were truely anything but) over the decades, BUT that is their job. To get bums on seats in the cinema to pay for the huge expense of producing the film.
One of my all time favourites for this was the trailer for "The Avengers" .Not the Marvel one ,the 1998 British spy one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4VZ2mcuxKQ . It looked cool, interesting and very like the original series which I loved as a kid (particularly Diana Rigg).
Then you have this version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9qmqxBlFzI. In which it looks and sounds as bad as it actually was.

So trailers have always been essentially about how far the studios will go to lie about a film just to get the public to go see it. The better the film the less likely they are to alter the truth of it.

But even that is changing now because multiple trailer versions (24 so far for Solo and counting!!!!!)freeze frame analyse ,storylines and preexisting information about franchises makes the movie plots easier to guess, CGI is being used to substantially alter the released cinema version from the trailer material without serious cost, so now we are getting a great deal of stuff that doesn't actually make it into the film.

CutThumb said:

Once, a long long time ago, the only way to see a trailer was to go to the cinema.

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Umm, how old are you, man? I've been watching movie trailers on TV since I was a kid in the 70s.

The Wook said:

Umm, how old are you, man? I've been watching movie trailers on TV since I was a kid in the 70s.

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There is a clue in the post, but if you're not much of a scooby, I save you the time, I'm a child of the sixties man. Actually it would be more accurate to say that a few more years from now and I will actually be a man in my sixties, man !!!!!! ******* hell !!!!

Back in the day I don't recall UK television ever carrying much in the way of cinema trailers, I mean we only got our fourth TV channel in 1982, our fifth in 1997 then Sky and finally digital hit 2007 ish. So, suddenly, we've got loads of channels now playing all the TV content I watched back in the early sixties and seventies. Weird.

I was laughing about it with my neighbour the other night, turn on the TV you' re effectively time slipping to your childhood. Man from Uncle, The Avengers, The Saint, Mission Impossible, every series of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Airwolf, A team, Knight Rider, the list is extensive. And thats not to mention the films .Its nice to catch some of them again, particularly the opennings, but it doesn't half make you realise how far we've come and how high our expectations REALLY ARE these days.

The same is true of trailers. I smile when I hear the US voice over man. Times have changed!!! And then some.,

As kids we usually had to wait for TV programmes like "Clapperboard" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJRqkV1ATs0 or "Screentest" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3cX8ZHDis4 to drop trailers and clips.

When you look at the content available to this generation today and you hear them complaining, well you want to tell them how lucky they are. Afterall , we lived in a hole in the road........

CutThumb said:

There is a clue in the post, but if you're not much of a scooby, I save you the time, I'm a child of the sixties man. Actually it would be more accurate to say that a few more years from now and I will actually be a man in my sixties, man !!!!!! ******* hell !!!!

Back in the day I don't recall UK television ever carrying much in the way of cinema trailers, I mean we only got our fourth TV channel in 1982, our fifth in 1997 then Sky and finally digital hit 2007 ish. So, suddenly, we've got loads of channels now playing all the TV content I watched back in the early sixties and seventies. Weird.

I was laughing about it with my neighbour the other night, turn on the TV you' re effectively time slipping to your childhood. Man from Uncle, The Avengers, The Saint, Mission Impossible, every series of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Airwolf, A team, Knight Rider, the list is extensive. And thats not to mention the films .Its nice to catch some of them again, particularly the opennings, but it doesn't half make you realise how far we've come and how high our expectations REALLY ARE these days.

The same is true of trailers. I smile when I hear the US voice over man. Times have changed!!! And then some.,

As kids we usually had to wait for TV programmes like "Clapperboard" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJRqkV1ATs0 or "Screentest" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3cX8ZHDis4 to drop trailers and clips.

When you look at the content available to this generation today and you hear them complaining, well you want to tell them how lucky they are. Afterall , we lived in a hole in the road........

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Ah yes, now I see it. You wrote, "cinema", not, "movies".

Well, you're not that much older than me, so perhaps it's a difference between our countries. I don't know about the 60s, but in the 70s, in America, we routinely got movie trailers on TV. We had 7 channels back then: ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and 3 UHF channels--which in Philadelphia were channels 17, 29, and 48.

I loved some of the British programming we'd get on PBS, such as Benny Hill and Fawlty Towers! And then in the 80s, Jeremy Brett in the BBC productions of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Brett was brilliant--the best Holmes ever!

Cheers.

The Wook said:

I loved some of the British programming we'd get on PBS, such as Benny Hill and Fawlty Towers! And then in the 80s, Jeremy Brett in the BBC productions of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Brett was brilliant--the best Holmes ever!

Cheers.

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Well done that Wookie !!!!
Your SHIQ just skyrocketed with me!!!! Excellent call on Jeremy ,my favourite Holmes and a superb series .

And funnily enough we were talking about "Benny Hill" the other night as well, and how he would be burnt at the stake in today climate. He was hugely popular in his day, now you could be shot through the lungs for even mentioning him in the wrong company. Same with many of the "Carry On" movies ,pretty tame and harmless fun in their day, but hey it upsets many of the righteous younger people to see it on TV , after watching all that real porn and sexting on their mobiles .

Treadwell said:

Yes they are, and the last straw was Rogue One...

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Agreed, but for different reasons. The three shots that had me absolutely drooling over this movie, weren't even in the film. To this day, I am still seething over this bait and switch element, fueled by the fact that one of those shots was admittedly never supposed to be in the movie, but was filmed "just because it looked cool". I don't want to hear about "editing" and "reshoots". Get your act together.

Movie-goers should be furious over this, but I haven't seen much concern over it. If it were more of a mainstream movie, I suspect it would have been a bigger issue.

Keycube said:

Agreed, but for different reasons. The three shots that had me absolutely drooling over this movie, weren't even in the film. To this day, I am still seething over this bait and switch element, fueled by the fact that one of those shots was admittedly never supposed to be in the movie, but was filmed "just because it looked cool". I don't want to hear about "editing" and "reshoots". Get your act together.

Movie-goers should be furious over this, but I haven't seen much concern over it. If it were more of a mainstream movie, I suspect it would have been a bigger issue.

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Which shots were they? I presume one of them was Jynn coming face to face with a tie fighter which was my favorite part of the whole trailer.

ddspike22 said:

Which shots were they? I presume one of them was Jynn coming face to face with a tie fighter which was my favorite part of the whole trailer.

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That, the shot of Krennic looking down and all pensive (which, in truth, could have been in the movie and I STILL would have been pissed, because it painted him as cool and daunting), and the shot of Jyn in Imperial garb, looking back from the corridor with the neat lighting (the BS "cool but gotcha!" shot).

CutThumb said:

Well done that Wookie !!!!
Your SHIQ just skyrocketed with me!!!! Excellent call on Jeremy ,my favourite Holmes and a superb series .

And funnily enough we were talking about "Benny Hill" the other night as well, and how he would be burnt at the stake in today climate. He was hugely popular in his day, now you could be shot through the lungs for even mentioning him in the wrong company. Same with many of the "Carry On" movies ,pretty tame and harmless fun in their day, but hey it upsets many of the righteous younger people to see it on TV , after watching all that real porn and sexting on their mobiles .

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CutThumb, A Scandal in Bohemia is my favourite (see how I spelled that for you!) mystery in the Brett series, followed closely by, The Second Stain.

Yes, Benny was the man! As was Basil Fawlty! lol

Keycube said:

Agreed, but for different reasons. The three shots that had me absolutely drooling over this movie, weren't even in the film. To this day, I am still seething over this bait and switch element, fueled by the fact that one of those shots was admittedly never supposed to be in the movie, but was filmed "just because it looked cool". I don't want to hear about "editing" and "reshoots". Get your act together.

Movie-goers should be furious over this, but I haven't seen much concern over it. If it were more of a mainstream movie, I suspect it would have been a bigger issue.

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I agree, Keycube, trailer shots that don't make the picture infuriate me. There was one in the King Kong trailer that still bothers me it never showed up in the film.

So, I'm curious, what were the three conspicuously missing shots?

Also, 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:


BLECH!!!

The Wook

The Wook said:

So, I'm curious, what were the three conspicuously missing shots?

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Hey there, I outlined them above your post.

I will admit, those other two shots weren't major alternate plot points or anything...BUT...they did tantalize my inner narrative somewhat. Now, that's on me, I realize, but once I saw that things weren't going how I thought they were going to go with the film, if I could have at least seen those scenes in a new context to make me go, "Ah, now I see what that was about", I would have actually felt better about certain things. But to have them be outright nonexistent is just BS, no matter what their context would/could/should have been.

I see missing shots in trailers all the time. I just chalk it up to the need to get a trailer out and they use what they shot at the moment. Sometimes during final edits, those initial shots are cut out.

But my gripe is that many times I will go see a movie and as I walk out, I am like: " Well, all the good funny parts were in the trailer, so I didn't need to see this after all". Now it is a running joke with my wife, after watching a new long trailer, we laugh and say: "Well, we just saw the whole movie so no need to go to the theater".