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Loading ...I don’t want to see the whole flippin’ film in the trailer!
khenry
Less than two weeks before its release, Cloverfield is currently an old-fashioned marketing campaign with the poster(s) following up on two trailers which didn’t give much away. By contrast, the second trailer for AVP Requiem showed you the vast majority of events, which, when the latter only lasts 93 minutes, is a really stupid idea.
It only used to be Disney’s adult film arm that was guilty of full-film trailership, but now every other rival studio has copied them, meaning that you could easily bypass a movie that you had pre-judged as pants from the trailer. The only recent exception is Knocked Up, which managed to pack a full two-hour feature into the mix which it hadn’t shown you with all the comedy clips in the teaser that gave you the idea that it was more like Superbad from the same producer.
There’s an art to great trailers and the first two wordless Alien film teasers were historic classics. Trailers for Arnie’s early action films were as laughable and cheesy as the decade in which they were filmed, but Commando stands out as the best and the funniest. The first two Brosnan Bonds were a little more recent. Jurassic Park - would you have watched it if you’d seen the dinosaurs before you paid to see the whole thing? It would have been ruined in a pre-DVD age (though that’s what they did in France).
It’s different for a film of a true story where you know the boat sinks or the resistance fighter gets shot/burned/hung. However, all suspense is killed by a trailer that tells you too much about a fictional film. Thankfully, a Hollywood studio’s usually happy to let its the UK distribution arm recut a trailer for us, meaning that in the case of The World Is Not Enough, you didn’t know you were seeing all the best bits of the film as the trailer was so expertly edited. Goldeneye was also the grand return of Bond after a seven year gap and the trailer reflected this - in the UK.
It would be a shame if global marketing campaigns imposed these whole-film trailers in the style of the best tracks from albums getting released straight away as singles, making the album something not worth bothering with. There has to be something left to see if a trailer is meant to get you to pay full price to see the whole thing, so hopefully Hollywood will carry on letting local English language distributors (UK, Oz, etc) cut their own as appropriate, as in general Brits and serial cinemagoers want every film to be fresh and new when they sit down to watch.
The problem with Cloverfield is that its made by the same guy who gave us Lost. Therefore there’s a good chance we will watch the whole feature film and still not know what it’s all about 