10 Simple Fixes That Would Make Movie Trailers Awesome Again

3. Avoid Cross-Cutting Scenes

No trailer trope is more overused than the beat-altering joke: a teaser's running along nicely, setting up the plot and introducing the characters, and then - wham - the music stops and somebody says something funny (or is at least something meant to be funny). It's a fair enough marketing trick by itself, yet readily gets abused; comedies obviously do this multiple times in a trailer (usually to condition an audience to some of the bigger jokes in the film), but it's also pretty prominent in ads for "straight" movies, leading to trailers becoming a mush of generic gags that make movies completely indiscernible from each other.

But, worse than that, all too often these "funny moments" are made up of two different moments and twisted into a Frankenstein punchline. And to what end? If the movie doesn't have any quippy gags, then don't just pretend it does. Fant4stic even used the same shot of Kate Mara laughing (hopefully originally at how dire her situation was) as the framing for multiple cross-cutting jokes across several trailers, none of which were actually funny exactly because they were each clearly constructed from three totally unrelated scenes.

It's not just for manufacturing jokes that this editing trick is used for either; look at how random lines are run after each other to create the illusion of a conversation or grandiose statement that just isn't in the film (Lex Luthor has stated two different "biggest lies in America" across Batman V Superman's marketing). The result is always the same too; the varied intonation in the lines' deliveries just makes it all sound very disjointed.