You’ve come to see a movie but first you need to sit through a good fifteen minutes of plugs for other movies because where will studios find a better audience for upcoming films than one that has already paid for a current movie? The actual term trailer is misleading. You would think from the term that the commercial would be played after your main attraction, and that’s how it used it be but they quickly realized that patrons were leaving theaters instead of sticking around for the trailers so they put them before the main event.

The purpose of a film trailer is not really what you might think it is. Most people would respond that it’s there to let you know about an upcoming release. But the trailer’s true purpose is to make you want to see that film. Basically the trailer has been created to put your butt in the seat of the theater when it runs that upcoming movie. It’s a commercial, and like any good commercial it sells its product, whether it’s a true reflection or not of the movie.

In today’s information highway superage movies need digital buzz to help sell the movie, and trailers play a big part of that. They can also ruin a movie if the trailer doesn’t work. Remember when people got a first look of the Hulk in Ang Lee’s Hulk? The commercial ran during the Super Bowl for a June release and as soon as the CG image of the Hulk was revealed fans were online discussing how bad he looked and how the effects did not work. Instead of building anticipation for a summer release it did the opposite. There was also Sony’s Godzilla in 1998. Some clever marketing executive thought it was a good idea to not reveal the monster in trailers and commercials. The film did not open as big as expected because of this. The monster IS the movie, it’s his name in the title, why would we not want to see what he looks like before we enter the theater?

The main complaint from the movie going public about trailers is that they don’t accurately reflect the movie. But honestly, they don’t have to. The point of the trailer isn’t for you to like the movie you’ll eventually see, it’s to get you to pay for it and studios will use every trick imaginable in the trailers to get you to see the film. The trailer for Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation made the movie look like a clever laugh out loud comedy starring Bill Murray. And why wouldn’t it? Murray has a history for funny movies from Caddyshack to Groundhog Day. This was being sold as another one of those. Almost every scene of Murray interacting with the local Japanese was used in the trailer to play up the comedy of a fish out of water scenario, but the real movie was so much more than that. They also used upbeat Elvis Costello music to get the feeling of a good time, a party vibe. The movie was more of a deliberately paced drama than laugh out loud comedy.

View the Trailer for Lost in Translation

Another useful device for trailers is the quick cut. In The Road they used that editing tool and a moving drum beat to give you the feeling that the movie was a thriller about the end of the world. The trailer made the movie feel like a Roland Emmerich production, but the truth was that the film was a tender tale about a father and son surviving in a post apocalyptic world. It was much less thriller and much more drama. Even the use of Charlize Theron in the trailer is misleading, if you’ve seen the film you know what I mean.

View the Trailer for The Road

Misleading trailers are nothing new. Take a look back at Gremlins released in 1984. First off, the trailer never shows the gremlins which is a mistake, but the voice over describes them as clever and mischievous. The film comes across as little monsters that are cute and harmless. While there is definitely some of that in the movie, once the gremlins start terrorizing the town it has a more action/horror feel to it, especially the last scene which is pretty scary.

View the Trailer for Gremlins

Now there are also Red Band trailers which don’t run on TV so they can have nudity and cursing in them. This is an excellent way to sell those rated R comedies but sometimes the people creating them spend more time showing how crude the movie might be instead of trying to show how funny it is. Just because you can curse in a red band trailer doesn’t mean you should jam as much of that in as possible at the expense of really selling the humor. The recent trailer for Your Highness is an excellent example. I didn’t laugh once but was definitely shocked at the crudeness and raunchiness.  Cursing and shock are no longer reasons alone to see a movie.

View the Trailer for Your Highness

A good trailer (one that makes you want to see the movie) should be considered an art form. There are even awards handed out yearly for those that do excellent work, the Golden Trailers. Trailers are a lot like music videos which were created to help sell the music. But as music videos got bigger and better they have become an outlet for the artist to express themselves and some are seen as real art or mini movies. Can trailers be placed on the same level as a great music video? Probably not, but the reason for creating both is similar.

Trailers alone should not be the reason for seeing a movie, since they are intentionally misleading in order to sell you on the movie. You can complain about how a trailer was misleading after you saw the movie, but I’ve never heard of a theater giving someone back their money because the trailer didn’t match the actual movie.

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