Don’t Cum Too Soon – Why Modern Trailers Have Crippled Cinema’s Excitement, by Chris Derrick – Sympathy for the Devil #13 | @MDWorld

March 24, 2012 Chris Derrick 1 Comment

The rabidly anticipated HUNGER GAMES… IS… OPEN… NOW!

Another YA, female-skewing adventure fantasy that looks to tear up the box office (let it also be known that the trailer for the final installment for the Twilight saga is playing in front of the HUNGER GAMES); and expect men, women and boys to all attend in spectacular numbers.

If you’ve been eagerly and avidly watching the trailers in hopes for knowing more about the movie’s actual “hunger games”, you’re out of luck. I’m not the first one to point out that the $45m marketing campaign that Lionsgate has mounted shows scant (if any) peeks at the titular action.

Many reason that the violence of the Hunger Games shown out of context could deter a certain portion of the audience (although that’s hard to believe, because the books are a literary goldmine… exactly how Hollywood wants/needs to do it to ensure success). However, Lionsgate is just being nostalgic with the amount of information it is strategically doling out to the audience, and exercising a superb sense of restraint to enhance the desire to see the film by not showing any Third Act material in the trailer. It’s like a burlesque show, not a striptease… both are effective, and have the same underlying goal – enticing the audience to pay for entrance to a dark room for hours of entertainment.

I’ll admit a bit of so-called sacrilege right now – I haven’t seen the trailer for THE AVENGERS, and I refuse to.

Why?

It’s very simple; way back when the media blitz for ALIEN 4 was unleashed on us, I saw the trailer and in the trailer there was an shot/image of Winona Ryder in a certain context that was exciting. However, when I saw the movie and her character – Call – supposedly died in the middle of the 2^nd act, my mind immediately recalled that “image from the trailer” and I knew she wasn’t dead… so I began to think, “oh, she must be an synthetic, because no ALIEN film would be complete without an android.” Sure enough Ryder shows up later revealing that she’s a synthetic. If you remember the first time you saw Ridley Scott’s first installment in the series (SPOILER ALERT), when Ian Holm’s Ash turned out to be a synthetic it was genuinely surprising and turned the movie on its head. I believe there was something similar in ALIENS with Bishop. So it’s part of the tropes of the franchise, but let me experience when it happens not have it preordained in my head from the marketing!

All of this was prior to me studying the mechanics of screenwriting and filmmaking in general, at which time I gained a deeper appreciation for the value of unleashing surprises on the audience in the Third Act – where everything comes together and roars to the finish. These scenes and cinematic moments should be the most explosive and shocking and surprising. So what is truly sacrilegious is that movie studios and their pernicious marketing departments have such little faith in their audience and their product that they give away the store in the trailers.

In the intervening 15 years since ALIEN 4, movie trailers have become expansively more vicious culprits in destroying the excitement of seeing a movie unfold in the cinema (because if it doesn’t work there – make box office gold – then home video and the rest is there to clean up the loses; which is less and less possible these days as physical media dies),

Ask yourself, how many times have you seen a trailer and said, “Well, I’ve seen the whole movie, so why waste the $9 (or $10 or $15) AND THE TWO HOURS to see what you’ve just showed me in 2 minutes?”

Back to Joss Whedon’s THE AVENGERS… I have enjoyed all of the Marvel Studio’s movies so far (except for IRON MAN 2, it didn’t have the villain effectively focused to triumph), so I have HIGH, HIGH hopes for THE AVENGERS… mainly because of the breadcrumbs that have been laid in IRON MAN, IRON MAN 2, THOR and CAPTAIN AMERICA in those after the credit Easter Eggs, culminating with the flash-cut teaser at the end of CAPTAIN AMERICA… but that near-incoherent selection of images wasn’t trying to tease out a narrative, so the story points and all the revelations are still unset in my mind and I’ll happily watch them unfold at the Arclight up the street on Sunset.

Many times one of the supplements/bonus material on a DVD was a film’s original trailer… and these are particularly interesting to watch for films pre-mid90s films to see how the trailers were cut; not some much of the story was released – many of us fell in love with cinema from waiting in line to see those films, not knowing what to expect. Take a look at the GODFATHER trailer or the one for SUPERMAN (Richard Donnor’s original) or RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC… you actually WANT to see the movie to know WHAT it is. Nothing destroys mystery more than knowing too much information. I can almost bet that if EMPIRE STRIKES BACK came out now, that actual dialogue from the scene when Vader tells Luke that he’s his dad would be in the trailer; take a look at that trailer (which is a little goofy) — NOTHING from the 3^rd Act!

As the movie industry has been forced to take less and less chances on original and/or challenging material (due to spiraling budgets) coupled with the damn-near enslavement to the “high concept” film (one that can be told in two quick sentences), it has crippled the entertainment value of the vast majority of films. When a film doesn’t fit in the genre box, it supposedly makes it difficult to “sell” to the ever-distracted public; so any genre-defying film is considered “risky” because the refrain (and “pass”) will be, “we don’t know how to sell it”… and to that I say, “Be bold… be persuasive!” Advertising has the unique ability to convert people’s thoughts by implanting ideas and images that build up to a greater meaning… when it’s done smartly, so why do we, the audience, need to be spoon fed what we want to marvel at seeing. The term “movie magic” does encompass the concept that we want the same inexplicable wonder that we feel when a magician smoothly tricks us.

I’m looking forward to seeing the HUNGER GAMES (although I have a suspicion that it’s a Westernized variant of the Japanese film BATTLE ROYALE) and THE AVENGERS and PROMETHEUS… but not because I’ve seen the trailer, but because of the storytellers involved.

The incessant need for “branding” of entertainment personalities and content creators doesn’t seem to be tactically exploited when marketing all sort of film projects. I know that Damon Lindelof, one of the masterminds behind “Lost” and the STAR TREK reboot, is one of the screenwriters on PROMETHEUS – I don’t know if that’s being touted enough in the marketing, because that is added value in terms of storytelling expectation. Sure, its directed by Ridley Scott, one of the true visionaries in cinema over the past 35 years, and we know it’s some sort of prequel to Scott’s ownoriginal ALIEN… so the pedigree is strong enough to take money from my wallet.

Ultimately, I applaud Lionsgate for being so seductively teasing with the prerelease marketing campaign (as it will no doubt change after the opening weekend… and the violence level will be dissected on the blogosphere and elsewhere, thus prompting more “lift-my-skirt” trailers). The question is… will the other studios/distribution entities become emboldened by the success of this style of marketing campaign and take more risks to imbue more excitement in elevating interest in a film… as that’s all a trailer is supposed to do.

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