10 Simple Fixes That Would Make Movie Trailers Awesome Again

2. Stop With This "One Surprise" Marketing Tactic

The criticism that movie trailers spoil far too much can be seemingly countered by a barrage of recent examples where secrets were kept tight until release: Luke in Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Dr. Mann in Interstellar; the return of Jean and Cyclops in X-Men: Days Of Future Past; presumably the Justice League in Batman V Superman and Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War. Those are all pretty cool moments that were kept on the down-low, right?

Well, yeah, but what do these "major surprises" all have in common? That they're singular moments, one-and-done secrets against a backdrop that has otherwise been fully revealed. We're now at a point where movies have one allocated surprise that isn't shown explicitly designed to pique interest ahead of release or manufacture shock in the cinema, with everything else openly shown and discussed in the build-up to release.

There are exceptions to this - Star Wars kept a lot more under wraps than most, even if a lot was eventually revealed/alluded to in TV spots - but this is definitely emerging as a hard-and-fast rule, perhaps in reaction to the rise of spoiler culture. But why does it need to be this way? Yes, it's nice to have a morsel of surprise in the cinema, but wouldn't it be nicer to get a proper shock from a big movie?

Even Iron Man 3, which contained a shock so controversial that years on it's still a heavily divisive film, only really had that one ace up its sleeves; everything bar the Mandarin twist was out there from the start.