5 Annoying Ways Trailers Trick You Into Seeing Movies

In a huge study on the way people react to movie trailers, they discovered that one of the strongest indicators as to whether we'll see a movie is the actors in it. And how excited we are to see those actors is based on whether or not they're appearing in the same type of movie we've already seen them in. So while we might make fun of Johnny Depp for playing "wacky clown thing" in like 30 different movies, on paper it's a pretty solid career move. After all, look at the highest-grossing movies of 2014: we have Transformers: Age of Extinction (featuring Mark Wahlberg as a dumb man's man), Guardians of the Galaxy (featuring Chris Pratt as an idealistic goofball and Zoe Saldana as a sexy alien with weird skin color), and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (featuring Andy Serkis as a CGI monster).

Naturally, this puts movies with unique premises or weird tones in really difficult situations -- common sense would indicate that key demographics are starving for something new, but if you look at the research you'll find that people don't even watch trailers for movies when they don't already like the genre. Which is why they fudge interesting movies into boring, cookie-cutter shapes: Don Jon was advertised as a romantic comedy even though it's more or less an anti-romantic comedy about cougar widows and porn addiction. Drive was sort of famously advertised as a Fast and the Furious knock-off even though it's actually about a guy having a little bit of trouble expressing himself properly. And this has been going on forever: Back to the Future was actually marketed as a teen sex comedy, with the tagline "Are you telling me my mom has the hots for me?" and a teaser in which a woman with a husky voice asks Marty how far he's going.

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:

Walt Disneyfav

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

Walt Disney
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.

Universal Pictures
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 ...

Warner Bros./Screen Gems

... 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.

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.

Walt Disney
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.

To hell with you, trailer. What the hell did I waste my time doing just now. You showed me nothing. And what do you think "exclusive" means? Why do you keep doing this to me?

Well ... because the difference between movies and trailers is sorta shrinking. On one hand, we're so excited about upcoming movies that here at Cracked we regularly do whole articles about specific, upcoming trailers -- because talking about them is super fun. And on the other, most movies now have trailers for the next movie built into them: Guardians of the Galaxy hints at Rocket and Peter Quill's origins, Wolverine hints at X-Men: Days of Future Past, and 12 Years a Slave ends with Denzel Washington emerging from the shadows to talk to Chiwetel Ejiofor about "The Railroad Initiative." Anticipation is a big part of storytelling during a movie, and now they've figured out how to spread that anticipation out before the story even starts and extend it long after the movie ends. The marketing campaign is a part of the story.

Think I'm stretching things? Then look at the Marvel One-Shots. These are short films released on the Blu-rays for Marvel movies, and so far have acted as trailers for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter, and whatever movie The Mandarin ends up appearing in. But at the same time, there's no footage in there that teases those shows or any of the movies. As we've pointed out before, shooting footage for trailers that doesn't actually show up in the movie is a pretty old technique -- the difference here is that instead of lying, they're setting up the content that you'll see once you see the movie.

If you still don't believe me, remember that movie trailers get leaked now. Cracked can write whole articles about specific movie trailers now, and there are no other types of advertisement we can do that for. And yet everyone enjoys reading them. Because everyone enjoys watching and talking about them on their own, as individual pieces of content. Which makes them entertainment.

Decide for yourself whether or not that's a good thing.

JF Sargent is an editor and columnist for Cracked, coming soon to a Twitter and Facebook near you (BWAAAAAAAM).

For more from Sarge, check out 4 Valuable Life Lessons (That We Never Follow) and 4 Surprisingly Simple Fixes for Famously Bad Movies.

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