Every time a trailer released for the newest movie to come to cinemas, they usually garnered loads of excitement for moviegoers, yet that seems to have changed. There’s a fundamental problem with film marketing these days that I feel needs to be addressed. It’s hard for film trailers to garner excitement on their own. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that they never succeed, but there is a noticeable significant drop in quality in movie trailers.
One major glaring issue is that modern movie trailers spoil everything about the film they are advertising in a cheap attempt to get butts in the seat. There are so many film trailers that blatantly show off shots from every single scene in the film to the point where you already feel like you’ve seen the film before you’ve stepped into the movie theater. Now this isn’t a new problem, as movies from even 20 years ago still had this issue, however, it’s a noticeably more widespread issue than it was before.
The 2019 film “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” is one example. The film’s marketing was well done and portrayed the film’s tone quite well. The only problem is that it spoiled everything that happened in the film. The trailers for “The Amazing Spiderman 2,” from 2014 spoiled a crucial death of an incredibly important character and the very recent “Jurassic World Rebirth” practically spoiled every single dinosaur scene in its marketing campaign. An example of a modern film trailer that gets around this problem is the trailer “Zootopia 2” as it shows off just enough to get viewers interested in seeing the film while keeping the overall plot in the dark.
Another common issue is that a film’s marketing isn’t given nearly as much as it should. A recent example of this is “Transformers: One,” which portrayed the film as a poor copy of the franchise specifically catered to children, when it was one of the best films to come out of the series in years. Another example is “Elio,” which completely flopped due to the studio’s refusal to market it. It’s not all that uncommon to see a film fail due to poor quality trailers or a lack of marketing these days.
