10 Movie Trailers That Pointlessly Spoiled Huge Details
When trailers give huge beats away for NO REASON.
No part of the movie marketing process is more important than a trailer, because it grants studios the grandest opportunity to convey to audiences what a film's plot, style, and tone are all about. And yet, it's a common criticism of modern movie trailers that they just give way too damn much away.
Studios just love to fill their trailers with spoilers from late in the movie, perhaps even giving away epic plot twists, because they're just that desperate to get you to buy a ticket.
While studies have consistently shown that casual moviegoers actually like spoilerific trailers because they want to know precisely what they're going to get, there's certainly a line where this goes too far, where an overzealous trailer risks robbing the film of its impact.
And that's absolutely the case with the following ten trailers, each of which gave away so, so much more than they needed to in order to engage potential viewers. They just straight-up revealed the big villain twist, a secret third act action sequence, a certain character death, and everything else in between.
The lesson here? If a movie sounds interesting enough, just don't even bother watching the trailers at all.
10. Everyone Gets Off The Bus - Speed
The trailer for Speed does a generally fantastic job of hyping the action classic up as the sweaty-palmed, high-octane thrill-ride that it ultimately is, but also gets a little over-zealous with basically spoiling the movie's very conceit.
In the hallowed tradition of '90s movie trailers that give away the A-to-Z plot for free, Speed's almost three-minute trailer flagrantly shows the ill-fated bus exploding while crashing into a plane, and the actual passengers watching the explosion from a distance, making it clear that they get off the bus and survive.
Beyond that, the trailer also spoils that there's an additional action sequence after the bus scenario is resolved, where heroes Jack (Keanu Reeves) and Annie (Sandra Bullock) battle villain Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) onboard a runaway train, while also spoiling that said train crashes onto the street.
It's just as well that Speed is such an impossibly awesome movie that audiences wanted to watch it anyway, but the marketing team really didn't need to blow their whole wad here.