Stolen from Empire magazine, October 2024. This short piece is written by the magazines editor.
“The trailers I remember most fondly are the ones that tantalise”
NICK DE SEMLYEN ON THE FADING ART OF MAKING MOVIE PREVIEWS THRILLING
IN 1996, BACK when I was a teenage Empire reader, I eagerly pawed open the gift that came with issue 80: a videotape containing “an hour’s worth of the best trailers of the year”. Popping the cassette into my cumbersome VHS machine, I devoured the teasers for Toy Story, Heat, Broken Arrow, Loch Ness and more. It didn’t matter if some of the films looked a bit lame — who greenlit a meet-up between Ted Danson and a water-monster? — because in my book, movie trailers were great. They sizzled with promise, splicing together thrilling and funny moments, fizzed up with clever editing and judicious deployment of Voiceover Man.
Flash forward to 2024, and my love of movie trailers has dwindled. In fact, I even sometimes find myself jettisoning out of them midway through. Partly, admittedly, it’s because they’re just so accessible now — you can’t go on social media without running across a teaser or two, let alone the infinite array you can find on YouTube. Partly it’s because of the deeply annoying trend of trailers starting with their own three-second mini-teaser, ruining the best bits. But mostly it’s because they are frequently happy to give the house away. They just keep going and going and going, throwing expensive money shots at you that will consequently be less dazzling when you see them on a cinema screen.
Take the marketing for Speak No Evil (pictured above), the new remake of a 2022 Danish horror film. Over almost three minutes, the trailer rattles through the film chronologically, blithely revealing twists, turns and huge moments. Would it not have been more effective to just tease the unease, to hint at the darkness behind James McAvoy’s eyes without roughly 120 seconds of him going full fruit-loop? Or there’s the trailer for Gladiator II. Rather than trust that the sight of Paul Mescal facing down a rhino will get people into cinemas (if that won’t, what will?), it throws so much ancient Rome at you that you end up dazed. “Brevity is a great charm of eloquence,” said legendary Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero. I reckon he had a point.
The trailers I remember most fondly are the ones that tantalise, that give you a vibe without spoon-feeding you a plot. Like the genius one for Terminator 2 that whisks us through the infernal machinery of a robot-factory. Or the one for 1998’s Godzilla, which sees the giant lizard total a T-Rex skeleton in a glorious example of inter-studio passive-aggression (The Lost World: Jurassic Park was in cinemas when the teaser dropped). The art of trailer-making is still alive — the promo for Longlegs is an outstanding mood-piece that gave little away — but they too often feel mechanical and desperate, rather than bold and ingenious. It’s time to make teasers that tease again.
That annoyed me too. What killed trailers for me was the first Deadpool film - the actual movie just felt like the trailer but with added padding. I’ve tended to watch the minimum I can and that’s usually the ones that play in cinemas which tend not to be the most spoilery. Even then it can go wrong - I managed to avoid the later trailers for Deadpool and Wolverine, one, apparently containing the unnecessary reveal that Sabretooth was back, only to have an article pop up in my newsfeed.
I am curious why they reveal so much - is it to drip feed reveals in that can keep feeding the social media beast? I often get offered “articles” in my feed that are banging out the required number of words largely based on a poster or just a character shot. The one that mystified me recently was: “First look at Oscar Isaac’s hair transformation for Netflix’s Frankenstein movie”.
It got so much praise, and was used as a stick to beat other trailers with, so I am hoping that those making the trailers have learnt their lesson.