[Aptorian]

I felt like making this rant in the Star Wars movie thread because that is what this ties in to but maybe it warrants a legitimate discussion topic.

I am so god damn sick and tired of modern movie trailers. They go out of their way to spoil significant moments in film and out right ruin my interest in watching films, but worse than that - now I feel like I can't watch films in the cinema any longer.

Right, so I went and watched Star Wars: Episode 7:

Spoiler

The script from Episode 4 strikes back!

and as always I sat in legitimate dread of what kind of dickery was going to go on during the trailer show. This time I feel like Hollywood crossed a line. The trailer in question was, what I assume is the latest, Batman vs Superman trailer.

This fucking trailer. God damn. I am going to put this inside a spoiler block just in case you don't want a full synopsis of the entire Batman vs Superman movie, but this is the gist of what they showed us in the cinema:

Spoiler

- Batman and Superman meeting each other as civilians.
- Lex Luther meeting the both of them.
- The first meeting between the two heroes when they fight.
- It shows us significant fight sequences.
- It shows us Lex Luthor has Zods corpse.
- It shows us some kind of Doomsday monster attack Batman.
- It shows us Wonder Woman dropping in and protecting Batman.
- It shows us Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman united together fighting the monster.

+ Various voice over that one assumes is the best lines from the film.

This is the significant events I can recall of the top of my head.

WTF!? I just watched the entire film in 90 seconds! I am sitting there in my seat and there's nothing I can do. Am I supposed to try and run out of the room? Put my fingers in my ears, squeeze my eyes closed and scream as loud as I can?

Why do they do this?! No, I know why. Marketing research shows that actually showing the audience the best bits sells more tickets but get the fuck out of here!

Are people so god damn brain dead in this day and age that they can't watch a film with out having the plot served to them on a fucking platter?

I remember when I was younger, before the internet grew into the social media monster it is today. I used to love going to the movies because I could watch the latest trailers for films I didn't even knew was coming out. Hell, it used to be that you'd go see a film just because you'd heard a trailer was dropping that you could only see in the cinema.

Now? Now I don't want to go the cinema any longer. Sure, I could probably call up the place and ask them at what minute interval the trailers end and the actual movie starts playing but who the fuck wants that hassle? Better just watch it on Netflix in a year and fuck their ticket sales.

And it's not like Bat vs Supes is somehow an extreme example. All the latest trailers are like this. Everyone does this.

Am I the only one who thinks these practices are obscene? What is the benefit of watching a Synopsis of a film before you watch it?!

To me watching a film has to be engaging. I need to be enticed to keep watching. To me, watching a great film is like a journey. It's not really about getting from A to B but what happens in between. Sure, it's not like I couldn't imagine what Batman vs Superman is going to play out like but I want to be surprised. I want to experience the films best scenes as a part of a whole. A great film builds up the story through scenes and dialogue. If I already know what is going to happen, if I've already seen that speech, that twist in the trailer... Then what's the fucking point? I'm not going to pay 20-30 dollars for Movie Trailer: The Extended Edition.

I am so fucking angry right now.

This post has been edited by Apt: 22 December 2015 - 04:59 PM

[Abyss]

This is your world now.

Resistance is futile.

Accept it.

[QuickTidal]

It's been noted after the fact that what you saw in the BvS trailer has none of the REALLY big reveals. They are saving those for the film. You ASSUME you've seen the entire film, but you really haven't.

I'll go into spoilers too, even though we really needn't.

Spoiler

- Batman and Superman meeting each other as civilians.
- The first meeting between the two heroes when they fight.
- It shows us significant fight sequences.
Think about it. The film is Batman VS Superman...so right off the hop you know two things just from the title. You know that Batman and Superman meet, and you know they fight.


- Lex Luther meeting the both of them.
Makes sense. We know Jesse Eisenberg is Lex, and we know that Lex is the most major Superman villain (but not one who you fight physically: More on that below)

- It shows us Lex Luthor has Zods corpse.
- It shows us some kind of Doomsday monster attack Batman.
Yep, this is new info. But we always knew that Superman and Batman were not goign to ONLY face off against each other..we knew that they'd be fighting something (they can't fight Lex...he's a mere human), and since up till this point we'd only known about Lex, it made sense it would be something Lex brought to bear on them. The fact that it's Doomsday-VIA-Zod corpse is a moderate surprise, but it's not completely out of the realm of a trailer nod. You saw Darth Vader in the trailers for STAR WARS, for example. Knowing about him didn't ruin that movie for you.

- It shows us Wonder Woman dropping in and protecting Batman.
- It shows us Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman united together fighting the monster.
The subtitle of the film is DAWN OF JUSTICE. This means that we are being introduced to the Justice League...and we start with the Trinity (Bats, Supes, WW), and they will be fighting that 3rd act baddie. It doesn't ACTUALLY show them fighting Doomsday...they just advance towards the screen. So this was a no-brainer, and showing it seems like par for the course to me.

Listen, I TOTALLY get the argument about modern trailers showing WAY too much. It's true in a LOT of cases. AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON did this, and it was confirmed when I saw the film. But I'm not at all sure you can lay this ire at the feet of the latest BvS trailer. There's lots in there we knew already, or are no-brainer from the title or the actors.

I think Star Wars TFA marketing should be held up as the new yardstick for keeping things under wraps. That movie featured SO much I hadn't seen in any of the trailers. It's was glorious.

Could we have had a less explanatory BvS trailer? Sure thing. But you gotta remember they are selling an entire movie universe on this film. It NEEDS to be marketed from the outset as the gateway to the DC film universe and the Justice League on the way. DC/WB NEEDS this to succeed, they need people to want to see it, the opening salvo into the DCU.

Thems my thoughts.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 22 December 2015 - 05:17 PM

[Coco with marshmallows]

Apt makes a valid point.

Another one fairly recently where a similar thing happened was (for me at least) Iron Man 3.

Now granted, there was one major reveal that wasn't in the trailer, but think how amazing the scene where Jarvis launches and controls 40-something iron man suits would have been if you hadn't already seen it in the trailer? For me, i reckon that would have made it one of the greatest moments in the MCU. As it was? it was more - oh that's when that scene happens.

A GOOD teaser/trailer can get you hyped for the movie whilst giving nothing away - Star Wars did this well, so did Guardians of the Galaxy (and the new Star Trek trailer does also - though critics might point to the fact that it's from a Fast and Furious director so there's probably nothing TO give away)

[amphibian]

The "priming" of the mass audience is a tactic that absolutely works.

I dislike it and in general, I don't watch any trailers whatsoever - not even for movies I like and want to watch. I have observed my brothers and cousins and they watch trailers at something like a pace of 25:1 for me and that 1 is usually them showing me that trailer. They are much more like QuickTidal than I am, in that their enjoyment gets magnified as they add on viewings of the trailers, the ad campaigns, the score, and then finally the movie and merchandise. I prefer almost always to see just the movie and then leave it at that. I don't buy scores, I don't buy merch, and I don't collect any of the posters or things like that.

What gets me going is print/online reviews written by people I trust or can tell that they obviously know their stuff and Twitter bursts from my friends. I'll read a bunch of those for something like Ex Machina and then go be amazed.

[Traveller]

I agree Apt. It was one of those trailers where at the end you think 'well, I don't need to watch that now.'

I like the minimum. Teasers only. Like Jurassic Park. At least I don't remember that giving anything away.

My usual rule is that if a trailer appears to show a ton of key points from the movie, and goes on for ages, then it's probably crap.

[Abyss]

The other big clue a movie is going to suck is when there are different trailers trying to depict it as different things. JUPITER ASCENDING was a horrible example of this... depending on when and where you saw the trailer it was an action flic, a romance, a mindfuck, a kids movie...


SUPESvBATS is trudging close. I agree that they're dropping massive reveals into the trailer, tho it's still tiny little chunks of a two hour movie that has a bit of an uphill battle ahead of it given the massive Marvel competition, divisive response to MoS and general feeling that DC is halfassingly desperate with this.

[QuickTidal]

Traveller, on 22 December 2015 - 05:49 PM, said:

I agree Apt. It was one of those trailers where at the end you think 'well, I don't need to watch that now.'

I like the minimum. Teasers only. Like Jurassic Park. At least I don't remember that giving anything away.

Actually: here is the first trailer.



That's the majority of the plot exposed (park, science tour, dino hatchling, dino's in pens, park down, humans and dino's not mixing, dino's run amock, ect.), two major chase sequences, the T-Rex reveal, the Raptors reveal...and to boot the 3rd trailer (I believe) featured the final shot of the film with the T-Rex standing in the building with the banner coming down around it.

It's about the same level of reveal to me as the BvS trailer.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 22 December 2015 - 06:16 PM

[polishgenius]

The thing is though QT that it would be possible for the BatSupes trailer to tell us everything you listed without giving away so many wow-shots and the like. That was my problem with it; it's not that it's telling me anything I didn't know, but it's showing me big film moments that should presumably be built up to, just like pow, in the trailer.

Some clever chap edited his own version and it's pretty much what it should have been in the first place.

[QuickTidal]

polishgenius, on 22 December 2015 - 07:02 PM, said:

The thing is though QT that it would be possible for the BatSupes trailer to tell us everything you listed without giving away so many wow-shots and the like. That was my problem with it; it's not that it's telling me anything I didn't know, but it's showing me big film moments that should presumably be built up to, just like pow, in the trailer.

Some clever chap edited his own version and it's pretty much what it should have been in the first place.

But how are you sure those are the biggest "pow" moments? Is I guess my point. They are big trailer moments for sure, but until we see the movie we don't know if they are the biggest in the movie.

There could be a bunch more "pow" moments in the film that we won't see till the day of.

I don't see anything wrong with using a couple of them to sell the movie, as long as it's not all of them. If that makes sense?

Now, if the movie comes out and these are the biggest moments from it (Like Age of Ultron), I'll eat crow and concede...but I'm not convinced that's what happened here.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 22 December 2015 - 07:19 PM

[blackzoid]

I seem to recall that the last Spiderman 3 trailer was guilty of this as well. I was annoyed when I saw that in the cinema.

[Whisperzzzzzzz]

Veering away from action films, I hate when a comedy shows its funniest two or three jokes in the trailer.

This post has been edited by Whisperzzzzzzz: 22 December 2015 - 07:49 PM

[Aptorian]

Oh yeah. The Simpsons movie had perhaps 5 minutes of good funny content. All of it pushed into extended trailers.

[D'rek]

Yeah, I despise this sort of thing, too, though it's not really a new phenomenon. Lots of movies in the 90s did this (like the Jurassic Park example above), as well as earlier (I think American Psycho is often toted a major example where the trailer not only shows but explains the climactic scene of the movie?). It might be more prominent today than it used to be, I'm not sure.

I definitely agree that the BvS one is a huge example. @QT - actually, I didn't know a lot of that stuff beforehand. But even then, there's a difference between, say, knowing Wonder Woman is in the movie and seeing her dramatic entry beforehand in the trailer. It's like saying "well, I know the good guys are going to win" in Star Wars (E:4:), so why not show Luke shooting the photon torpedo and the death star blowing up right in the trailer?

I imagine a big factor in these things is the huge budgets of Hollywood blockbusters nowadays. These movies cost soooo much money to make, that they need (or feel the need) to have these huge epic trailers in order to get people to see it or else some other blockbuster released that same week over-hypes them and the movie makes no profit. The stakes are even higher when the movie is part of some giant franchise (as so many of them are now) so it needs to support the next 4 movies in the franchise that are already being worked on, and additionally if it's a comic-book or other nostalgic franchise they have to do all these big "reveals" for years leading up to the actual movie release and the trailer becomes part of that, too. The only other option is to spend even more money on a more creative marketing campaign, but it'd be hard to justify spending even more money like that for every blockbuster.

[QuickTidal]

D, on 22 December 2015 - 08:10 PM, said:

I definitely agree that the BvS one is a huge example. @QT - actually, I didn't know a lot of that stuff beforehand. But even then, there's a difference between, say, knowing Wonder Woman is in the movie and seeing her dramatic entry beforehand in the trailer. It's like saying "well, I know the good guys are going to win" in Star Wars (E:4:), so why not show Luke shooting the photon torpedo and the death star blowing up right in the trailer?

That's a bit abstract of an example. Having Wonder Woman show up in the trailer is certainly NOT on the same level as the defining moment of the final act of Star Wars. I mean they aren't even in the same ballpark. A fair comparison to Star wars might be Obi-Wan whipping out his lightsaber and slicing off the Cantina guys hand in the trailer. Which it turns out was in the original Star Wars trailer (just checked)...heck, even the Vader VS Obi-Wan duel is in there. Arguably the only thing not in there is that torpedo shot.

And why are you sure that the shield scene is her dramatic entry? The scene that follows it APPEARS to be a reaction to the actual dramatic reveal by Batman and Superman (Is she with you? I thought she was with you.)...which isn't the same scene. The shield scene (from my POV) is her defending Batman from Doomsday's heat vision blast, as there is all kinds of ash and carnage around her at that time (not present in any of the Bats VS Supes fights we've seen).

I'm not saying the BvS trailer could not have been tighter...it likely could have...but I fully understand WHY it's not from a marketing POV. You can't sell the Justice League to casual fans like you can Star Wars. DC needs this to be a hit, and if that means they throw some cool Justice League stuff in the trailer, so be it. I get it.

[Traveller]

Ok, so JP was a bad example - I just recall seeing a teaser that had the mosquito in amber in Hammonds cane. It was enough to make me go buy the book, which I read way in advance of the film release.

When I saw Star Wars on Thursday, there was a trailer for the flick with DeCaprio. It went on for ages - it showed some of the characters dying early on, someone left for dead, but surviving, and crawling off for vengeance. And then it showed some of that, too. If I was planning on seeing it I would be majorly pissed as I'd have gone into it knowing which of the introductory characters get killed, by whom, and what happens afterwards.

Showing jokes in the trailer can really take the fun out of a first time watch, as you're pretty much waiting for the line to appear.

[QuickTidal]

Traveller, on 22 December 2015 - 08:45 PM, said:

Ok, so JP was a bad example - I just recall seeing a teaser that had the mosquito in amber in Hammonds cane. It was enough to make me go buy the book, which I read way in advance of the film release.


Showing jokes in the trailer can really take the fun out of a first time watch, as you're pretty much waiting for the line to appear.

Oh yeah, I was only pointing out JP cause I checked it out after you mentioned it and was surprised by how much it showed. But I fully see what you are saying, and yeah the teaser with just Hammond and the Amber caught mosquito was cool!

Yeah, comedies are strange. They want to sell them on being funny, but they can't show you all the best jokes in the trailer. A REALLY funny movie has enough jokes to throw away some in marketing, and save the good stuff for the movie itself.

I think the bottom line is I'd never want to work in film marketing. It seems like super stressful. LOL!

[Tsundoku]

Terminator: Genisys.

[champ]

Tsundoku, on 22 December 2015 - 09:19 PM, said:

Terminator: Genisys.

All the while reading this thread, I was thinking this, that was a terrible spoiler!

[QuickTidal]

champ, on 22 December 2015 - 10:37 PM, said:

Tsundoku, on 22 December 2015 - 09:19 PM, said:

Terminator: Genisys.

All the while reading this thread, I was thinking this, that was a terrible spoiler!

Indeed, and the director was PISSED that the studio made that reveal be in the trailers. He was interviewed afterwards and said if he'd had his way it would, NOT have been in there. He designed it to be an in-theatre reveal...the producers and studio overruled him sadly.