Trailers are the primary source of marketing for movies; a great trailer can thrill, excite, amuse and terrify us, making us desperate to see the latest movie the second it's released. However, there's an age-old trend of movie trailers often going too far and effectively diluting the movie-going experience, either by giving away plot points unnecessarily or misguiding us on the tone and nature of the film. There's an art to making movie trailers, and though many of these
seem exciting and well-edited, they are also prime examples of why avoiding trailers can sometimes be a very healthy thing. Here are 10 ways trailers are secretly ruining movies...
10. They Make The First Act Seem Pointless
There seems to be an unwritten rule with trailers that it's apparently OK to just blatantly spoil everything that happens in the first act, because this is just the "set up", and nobody really cares anyway. False, as evidenced by the above trailer for Contagion, which spoils the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow dies in the first half hour of the film. Though this is just the precursor for what happens later, wouldn't it have been an awesome surprise if we all went into the cinema not knowing this, especially given that Paltrow is an A-list star and we wouldn't generally be expecting her to die so soon? This "all bets are off" approach to the first act of a film sort of makes it feel perfunctory in the end; we're sat in the cinema, knowing pretty much everything that's going to happen in the first 30-40 minutes of a film, just waiting for the surprises to show up. It devalues all the time and effort put into those opening scenes, because unconsciously, we're probably paying less attention, complacent that we've seen it all already.