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Do Trailers Give Away Too Much?

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Master Milk said:
Yes. No film ever gets it right. All trailers suck.
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The original Cloverfield super-teaser that didn't even have a title (If I remember correctly) was excellent.

On the other hand, I accidentally caught the trailer for that movie about the Roman Legion's banner, and it spoiled the whole movie over about three minutes.
 
Jexhius said:
The original Cloverfield super-teaser that didn't even have a title (If I remember correctly) was excellent.

On the other hand, I accidentally caught the trailer for that movie about the Roman Legion's banner, and it spoiled the whole movie over about three minutes.
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Do you mean "The Eagle"??
 
Trailers these days DO give away too much, but most movies have stories that can be told in three minutes or less anyway...
 
YES!!!

That's why i avoid movie trailers like the black plague. After i see the movie i usually go check the movie trailer and 9 out of 10 times the trailer gives away the bests parts of the movie.
 
The Terminator Salvation trailer pretty much spoiled the film for me (and everyone else who has seen it I presume). Thats the last time I ever saw a trailer for a film I really wanted to see. I always try to watch it afterwards now. On a positive note, I really love Platoon's trailer. It really sums up the bizarre mood of the film.

Edit: I also don't understand trailers that don't advertise the movie properly. This happened a lot in the 90s for some reason. The best example I could think of was "The Truman Show". As a kid, I thought it would be just like any other Jim Carrey slapstick comedy but was somewhat surprised (and perhaps a little disappointed) at what the film was actually about.
 
They do. I try to avoid them because if I watch a trailer, then whats the point of watching the movie? You've shown all the action scenes AND the ending within 2-3 minutes. What makes it worse is if I did skip the movie in the theater the freaking DVD covers spoil the movie.

Oh let's not forget the trailers some make after a movie is released that shows even more of the movie to get people who haven't seen the movie to go see it.
 
I rarely watch trailers for movies I'm very interested in because of this, so I agree with the OP. Remakes are the worst offenders usually.
 
Robert Zemeckis is notorious for giving away the entire story structure in his trailers. (Off the top of my head, the trailers for Castaway and What Lies Beneath both gave away major third act developments.) For some reason he has this theory that the audience wants to know everything that's going to happen before seeing the movie.

Of course he's also been making creepy uncanny-valley mo-cap CGI for the last decade, so I'm not sure his cultural barometer is working properly.
 
Joe Shlabotnik said:
Robert Zemeckis is notorious for giving away the entire story structure in his trailers. (Off the top of my head, the trailers for Castaway and What Lies Beneath both gave away major third act developments.) For some reason he has this theory that the audience wants to know everything that's going to happen before seeing the movie.
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This is true but on his live action stuff, he appears to be right. What Lies Beneath spoils horribly, but it also gives the impression that Harrison Ford's character
is the good guy
which I think was Zemeckis' intended twist all along.
 
Yeah, way too much, just like intros in games (that's why I watch neither)..but I guess it is kinda hard to show enough to make people interested in the movie but not too much to spoil anything..I'd say it's nearly impossible.
 
shantyman said:
Watch some trailers from the sixties to see ones that gave away too much.
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Or even earlier. People liked to know going into the cinema if the two heroes were going to end up together in the end, the bad guy was going to die, what musical numbers were going to be in there, etc.

Hell some movies in the early 20th century came with playbills that summarized the entire movie.
 
The worst offender ever for me is the trailer to the movie that Tobey McGuire was in where he was a soldier, came back home, and his wife was sleeping with some other dude (was it his brother or something?).
 
kittoo said:
No mention of Gulliver's travels trailer in this thread? Gaf?
This movie had a trailer that had full movie story in it. Right from the beginning till the end. All the side-plots and even the conclusion was included in the trailer.
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Come on bro, there needs to be a link to accompany such a revelation!
 
kittoo said:
No mention of Gulliver's travels trailer in this thread? Gaf?
This movie had a trailer that had full movie story in it. Right from the beginning till the end. All the side-plots and even the conclusion was included in the trailer.
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So it was like that infamous Cast Away trailer?
 
To this day I'm happy that I avoided the 3rd trailer for Inception, until I had finished watching it in theaters. It gives away the opening, the best part of the Mombasa chase, the end of the warehouse shootout, the final dream location, and many other bits.

I'll continue to avoid the trailer's classified as "final" or "full theatrical" for movies that I care about watching unspoiled. First Class and Super 8 exemplify this.

Satchwar said:
The worst offender ever for me is the trailer to the movie that Tobey McGuire was in where he was a soldier, came back home, and his wife was sleeping with some other dude (was it his brother or something?).
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Luckily it doesn't end that way.
 
I'm not sure the bomb dropping scene in the Pearl Harbor trailer was really something to spoil the movie so much as set up the expectation that the movie was going to be an epic film about something that happened 60 years ago.

I mean, I can understand being upset when movies spoil the best parts or when, like most comedies, show all the good parts, but I can't really complain when I see a trailer about a historical re-enactment. "Jesus dies" and all that.
 
Everyone should feel ashamed. Trailers are tricky but when done right man do they get you syked for the movie. The Hangover is living proof of that. I didn't come here to talk about recent trailers however, I came here to talk about the MASTER of trailers.

Alfred
Fucking
Hitchcock

Trailers for Psycho, North By Northwest, and The Birds.

*edit* sorry to whomever caught the links earlier, they are fixed now.
 
SnakeswithLasers said:
I Am Legend. They spoiled
the dog dying
. I suppose that's predictable, but being predictable vs. being confirmed is a big difference.
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cant believe it took 2 pages for someone to mention that awesome trailer
 
Satchwar said:
The worst offender ever for me is the trailer to the movie that Tobey McGuire was in where he was a soldier, came back home, and his wife was sleeping with some other dude (was it his brother or something?).
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I could have sworn the movie was actually named Borthers, but that doesn't sound right.
 
I guess here is a good place to discuss.

Do you feel that the super 8 trailer/teasers are too vague?

I'm excited for the film because of the crew behind it, but i just don't know what the film is supposed to be about and what they show just looks like random nonsense to me.
 
I was watching The Mechanic (new one with Statham) this weekend and I thought this exact thing. A lot of the good scenes were shown in the trailer.
 
Almost always. If I'm at *all* interested in a movie, I simply avoid all trailers/ads now. Literally all of them. I'll look at my feat and ignore the audio as best I can if a trailer comes up before a movie.

Super 8 (and JJ Abrams stuff in general) is an example of ads done right, though. I actually was in a focus group a few weeks ago where we were shown seven different versions of TV spots. My initial feeling was "lol I had been trying to avoid ads for this" (though $75 made it easy to swallow), but none of them seemed to give away anything, they only had us going "okay we're seriously dying to know what's going on now."
 
With action films, the try to tell the basics of the story though quick edits and then try to end the trailer with "the money shot". The shot that cost the most and when you see it on the big screen it will blow you away, but most of the times it doesn't, the shot is already shown and the surprise factor of the shot is ruined and makes me wonder, why are filmmakers shooting themselves in the foot? Can the story itself sell the movie? and not some effect shot?
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Wait...action movies have stories?
 
The poster for Ponyo is from the last shot of the movie. Then again, it's not the kind of movie that would be spoiled by that.

I think the issue is that some movies just don't benefit from a traditional trailer. I remember seeing the Fight Club trailers and thinking it was going to be something akin to bloodsport--lots of dudes beating the shit out of each other. And that is the trouble with the "Usual Suspects" mindfuck-style movies--the actual point of the movie is itself a mystery, and making a standard trailer spoils the mystery. The unreliable narrator isn't quite as effective when the audience already knows that the narrator is unreliable!

I saw Fallen a few years ago on HBO (back when I worked for DirecTV and got it for free!) and loved it. The song "Time is on my side" creeps me the fuck out now to this day. But, if I had seen this trailer beforehand, I would have enjoyed it a lot less.
 
Trailers that I think have done it especially right:

Inception Teaser Trailer
It made me excited about the film, and it made me talk about it

Cowboys and Aliens trailer
Every 30 seconds or so, it completely blew my mind again, either with the team involved or with the fact that there are aliens in a cowboy film. I don't really know what's going to happen in the film, but I'm excited for it all the same.
 
Roger Ebert:

As the leadership of many studios is taken from creators and assigned to marketers, nothing is harder to get financed than an original idea, or easier than a retread. The urge to repeat success can be found even in the content of modern trailers, which often seem to be about the same upbeat film. Even The Beaver, with Mel Gibson battling mental illness, is made to look like a hopeful comedy with a cute stuffed animal.

Trailers also do their best to spoil secrets and sight gags for you. One executive told me: "We want them to feel like they're seeing the whole movie, except that it's longer." This model can also be found in the aisles of supermarkets, where you're offered a bite of cheese on a toothpick. After you eat it, you know everything there is to know about that cheese except what it would be like to eat a pound of it.
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(from his larger article on how embarrassing Hollywood and Sequelitis is in 2011; worth reading if only because he comes dangerously close to admitting that cable television is better than film when it comes to mature, well-written content)
 
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