My rant about movie Trailers
Is it me or has Hollywood lost their ability to do trailers? For those of you who don't know what a trailer is, it's a collection of shots from the movie that's used for advertisement to get people to watch the movie. I like watching trailers because of the mystery of them. I enjoy wondering how all of these shots will fit in the movie as a whole. One of the problems with trailers now is that they give away too much of the movie. Here's an example Cast Away is about a man whose plane crash lands on an island and he has to learn how to survive. If you saw the trailer for that movie you know he got off the island what the fudge?
What's the point in watching that movie if you're going to spoil the end? To be fair the trailer doesn't show us how he got off the island so you could watch the movie to see how that happened. Another example is Terminator Salvation, the trailer for that movie gave away the plot twist in that movie. Why? You ruined any incentive for us to watch this movie by doing that. Have you ever heard of the saying less is more? Another issue I have with trailers is that sometimes they miss lead you, I mean you think the movie is about one thing but it turns out to be something else. The 2003 Hulk movie is a prime example of this when I saw the trailer for that movie I was expecting it to be a mindless popcorn flick not bore me to sleep.
That was one of the many things that hurt that movie because if you were expecting one thing and got something different, you're not going to get good feedback. What also bugs me about trailers is sometimes they feel like highlights of the movie, I mean it let us know how the movie will play out without showing us everything. The recent Hulk movie and Avatar are examples of this which is one of the many reasons why I wasn't that impressed with that movie, but I digress. Again, why bother watching the movie if you know what the story is and how it will play out from beginning to end? Then again, the trailer for Avatar didn't hurt that movie's success. This issue can hurt comedy films as far as putting their best jokes in the trailer and people are not happy with the ones in the movie.
Another minor complaint I have with trailers is that some of the footage in the trailer is not in the movie, some of them are deleted scenes that are on the Blu-Ray. If Hollywood doesn't want to lose money they need to do a better job at editing trailers. The reason why I think we have this problem is that some movies got three or four trailers. I suggest that you stick with the teaser trailer because they don't tell us much about the movie and release another one a month or two before the movie's release. That's all I have to say about this subject for now.