Which means there was a point in American film-making history where bringing up incest seemed like the safer option. And they were right.

And, as that earlier Reddit thread pointed out, you can say the same thing about Guardians of the Galaxy:

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And that new Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer? I'm pretty sure it's doing the same thing the last trailer did.

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Though maybe "firing guns at imaginary threats" is just a cop's default setting.

But in addition to the CGI clearly, ya know, not being done yet, there's a bigger problem: we're in the wrong frame of mind.

When you're watching a movie -- particularly a good one -- you get swept up in the events of the story and can easily ignore visual flaws. This is why you've never heard anyone complain about the ridiculous shots of the titular spaceship crash-landing at the end of Serenity. Or the weird spear-thing that jumps right out of a Sega Genesis game to murder Wash.

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I keep expecting 30 gold rings to explode out of him.

But, in a trailer, the CGI is the selling point. There's no context to distract us from any tiny details, so the flaws are all you notice. Especially for a sequel to Jurassic Park, which is such a watershed of cinematic history that seeing shitty CGI in the trailer is like watching Eric Clapton walk on stage with a Guitar Hero controller around his neck.

So, what's the deal? Nobody wants to go see a movie they've already seen! People need surprises and novelty to be stimulated, right?

Well, no. We've already covered how studies prove that spoilers actually improve your enjoyment of the movie (spoilers for your life, I guess), and test-audience results for movie trailers have shown the same thing. Turns out that when they focus-test different movie trailers (say, one that only whets your cinematic appetite by saying stuff like "Actors!" and "Buildings maybe!" compared with another that reveals that Winona Ryder is a dog the whole time) they consistently find that the trailer that spoils the whole thing is the one that gets people most excited. Which is why spoiling the end of The Perfect Storm and Quarantine in their trailers and posters ...

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... helped those movies both open at No. 1 at the box office.

I guess the message is that if you want your audience happy, you don't want to surprise or confuse them -- you want to tell them exactly what they're going to get, then give it to them with only the slightest elaboration and maybe -- maybe -- a satisfying twist. Anyway, now on to entry #2 on my 5-point article about why problems with movie trailers exist.

This might sound pretty cut-and-dry -- advertisers are willing to lie to you to sell shit, right? That's certainly true sometimes (probably), but there's another, simpler problem here: the people making the trailers have no idea what'll actually be seen in theaters.

Movie trailers aren't made by the people who make the actual film, but separate studios that specialize in making trailers. So instead of working with a specific artistic understanding of what the film will be, they're getting raw footage straight from the set every day, and basically just going with whatever they think looked best. This is why the first trailer for The Social Network was a bunch of close-ups of random Facebook pages -- those were shot by the trailer studio, probably in their own offices, maybe even of their own Facebook pages.

But since this means that the people making the trailers don't really understand the thing they're advertising, why not just have the people making the movie devise the marketing strategy? They're filmmakers, after all, and understand better than anyone else what the best parts will be, right? For the answer to that question, just take a look at John Carter.

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Sorry to do this to you.

Despite the fact that the movie itself is terrible, it should've been a slam-dunk at the box office. It's a sci-fi epic based on a classic and influential novel, directed by Andrew Stanton, one of the big names from Pixar, a company that is printing money at this point. But one of Stanton's requirements was that he got full control of the marketing campaign, and he badly misjudged the entire world's familiarity with Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the source material. Stanton thought people were going to see the name John Carter and get the same chills you get when you see the Bat Signal or Wolverine's claws. Because he's kind of a crazy person. And while that may be exactly the kind of person you need to make Pixar movies, it's apparently not the kind of person you want marketing movies.

But, then again, sometimes it does work: Independence Day included a rough outline of the marketing campaign as part of the pitch ("People wanna see landmarks explode, right? We're gonna do that.").

So who knows what'll work? If you do, you can probably get a pretty good job making movie trailers.