Why are the trailers so bad right now?

Just like a feature film, trailers should be crafted like a work of art. Cut and stitched together like you would with the finest dress. After all, they are exactly a package: a gift wrap so beautiful that it lets us savor the gift inside. While it’s too easy to blame those who make the trailers - even if we've identified a potential culprit, which we will get to slowly - it’s also true that times have changed, along with our attention span. There are more products, and between movies and TV shows, you end up spending Friday night at home, lounging on the couch, without starting either because of the overwhelming, vast, and diverse offerings. The film industry seems to be witnessing a real epidemic of bad trailers, sometimes even fake ones: while the new trailer for Gladiator 2 amazes everyone with its record-breaking length, last August Lionsgate had to pull promotional videos for Megalopolis because some of the negative reviews shown on screen (since attracting attention now seems to be the media's only goal) turned out to be fake, created using artificial intelligence by a marketing consultant - who is now out of a job. But how did we get to this point? A romantic comedy classic teaches us well what a trailer should be: The Holiday (2006), written and directed by Nancy Meyers. We see it in the work of the protagonist, played by Cameron Diaz, a professional Hollywood trailer editor who views her life as a continuous presentation made up of key images. And that's exactly what a trailer should do: showcase the best potential of the product it’s selling. Because the film may belong to the realm of the auteur, but trailers, despite their artisanal craftsmanship, are still advertising.

Our Nickelodeon ancestors understood this from the start, with trailers at the end of the film instead of the beginning, as they were a real "trailer" – according to the literal English translation of the term: some sequences, title cards with text, and a cliffhanger even before TV series existed. A simple “Will our hero make it?” with the inevitable question mark was enough to entice viewers to return to the cinema. The evolution of trailers is indeed fascinating, closely tied to the history of the seventh art itself. Since the transition from silent to sound cinema, trailers evolved from frames to taglines, from taglines to impactful shouted phrases (“The Monster speaks!” - no need to say more for Bride of Frankenstein) until arriving at a full three-act structure for more recent trailers. In the middle, there were experiments like Alfred Hitchcock's invitation for Psycho, with the master of horror personally guiding the audience into the Bates house, and the arrival of MTV in the nineties with its unmistakable pop style.

Today, in an era where no one pays attention to anything anymore, a paradox has arisen: while everything else in the world of communication has become shorter (from videos that turned into reels to reels that became mini), trailers have gotten longer. This is not about the (not so) long-standing issue of films getting longer. In a time where there’s no time, where everything moves fast, and there is too much to choose from, a trailer that informs about every single thing that will happen can be an incentive for the average viewer to believe they won’t waste two hours of their life. On the other hand, the cinephile or, even more so, the anti-spoiler champion, will certainly object: why should I watch a film if everything that's going to happen has already been shown to me? Where’s the surprise, the wonder? It seems they’ve been replaced by another little trick that doesn’t sit well with fans, and Joker: Folie à Deux is fresh proof of this. Unfortunately, it has become common practice to plant fake sequences in trailers to mislead and deceive the audience. In the case of the sequel to the Joaquin Phoenix film, it may be due to a post-production cut, but in the official version with Lady Gaga, there’s no trace of the singing duo descending the stairs together, reminiscent of the iconic dance scene at Arthur Fleck's stairs from 2019. Some were waiting just for that, unironically. Marvel perfected this practice, a strategy to confuse, mislead, intrigue, and excite the MCU audience to the point where, as soon as they leave the theater after watching a comic book movie, they’re not thinking about whether they liked the film, but rather, "Where was that scene or character I was so excited to see after watching the trailer?"

Faced with the success of streaming platforms, which analyze viewing times to understand what interests viewers, cinema has had to adapt. Thus, even for highly anticipated films, trailer lengths have increased: Gladiator 2 has a runtime of about three minutes. At least it has sparked conversation, with the unlikely but fitting choice of No Church in the Wild as its soundtrack (the editors were convinced after hearing the lines “Tears on the mausoleum floor/Blood stains the Coliseum doors”), combined with the unexpected appearance of a rhinoceros, whose performance is now as eagerly anticipated as those of Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, and Joseph Quinn. As if that weren’t enough, now trailers have their own trailers. Not teaser trailers, which are pre-releases of the trailer that’s about to come and, although they don’t add much, at least help build buzz around the titles over several weeks, but even shorter and faster clips that culminate with the film's logo, inserted within the trailer itself. That said, if what comes after is rhythmic and thorough, enigmatic, and attractive, then it’s a minor evil that we can reluctantly tolerate. And in that sea of endlessness, something will eventually make you sit up. Maybe it’ll be unexpected, like Robbie Williams as a monkey in an exciting first look at his crazy biopic Better Man, shouting convincingly, “For the next two hours, your ass is mine.” But beware: it’s still just a teaser.