Trolling the Trailers

I get he is the Big Bad Wolf, but does he also moonlight
at the Copacabana Club on the jazz cello.

So, if you have been paying attention than in the past two weeks you have seen trailers for Jurassic World, Cinderella, Into the Woods, Pan, and of course the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Because it must have fell asleep watching Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman pretend to be in love.) Most of these movies won't even be out for another year or two, and yet we are already getting hurried glimpses of them to whet our appetites... because money. A month ago, the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer was dropped on us with similar pomp and circumstance, and with the kind of anticipation befitting the actual movie, instead of just a dolled-up commercial. Thanks to the Internet we no longer have to wait to see trailers in an actual theater anymore. We can now watch them on demand at anytime we like, and I am going to argue that takes the fun out of it, at least for me.

Now, do not mistake my tone. I very much enjoy watching trailers, (sometimes they are the best part of going to the movies,) but I am beginning to question the way in which we are starting to receive them. Studios have begun a trend of announcing trailer release dates like they do with movie release dates. I have so far refused to watch the new Star Wars trailer online, which has been hard considering it has dominated my Facebook feed for the past week. I want to see these trailers as they were intended to be seen, on a big screen. I still want that trailer experience when I sit down to watch a movie.

You see, I agree that trailers are amazing awesome things that help get us get excited about movies we all want to see. Good trailers can give me goosebumps. Part of that was that when I went to see a movie I always sat with a sort of wonder at what trailer I would see next and what it would show me. I liked sitting in front of that giant screen and feeling the anticipation. Would it be Lord of the Rings? Would it be a Batman trailer? Now that trailers are online and being pushed through social media like mini-must-see-movies I can't help but feel like my movie going experience has become just a little blander. Now I sit in in front of a giant screen and when I see a trailer start I know exactly what it is, what it will show, and feel as if just a little bit of that old magic has been lost.

Of everything I have read, this offends me the least.

But if you don't want to watch the trailers online, than just don't. No one is forcing you to... That is true, six-year old hypothetical annoying child. However, they are hard to avoid. I cannot even begin to number how many people have asked if I have seen this trailer or that trailer yet. (Again these are only trailers, not the actual movies.) Now that we have hyped up trailers to such a degree, if you don't intermediately view them the day they become available you find yourself being left out of conversations. That's not even the worst of it. Remember how I said I am refusing to watch the Star Wars trailer till I see it on the big screen? (You should, because I said it like two paragraphs ago... There will be a test on this.) Well, as much as I have been trying to avoid it, I have found that to be impossible. Because even though I have not watched the entire trailer, I have accidentally seen enough still-shots, two second clips, and come across enough analyses that I feel like I have seen it. Except instead of getting to watch it with fresh eyes in awe and wonder, it has now been given to me, piece-meal, through the lens of popular culture and controversy. (Apparently people don't like that lightsaber, which I am calling a broadsaber [patent pending].)

So whose fault is this?... Well, like global warming and Kathy Griffin's career, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We like hype. We like to get obsessive about our favorite movies and we like that feeling of anticipation. The Internet now allows us instant access to that feeling and movie studios are capitalizing on it in a big way. I am also going to put a little blame on Marvel, (lower your pitchforks and hear me out.) The comic movie giant has gone ahead and told us the release date for every single Odin-be-damned movie in their slate until almost 2020. That means all the guess work, all the anticipation, and all the unknown possibilities are gone. I'm not saying that I am disappointed with any of their movie announcements (far from it,) but I do think that what they did shows a trend in how movie executives are thinking. 

"Is that man leading a pack of raptors on a motorcycle?"
"You think that's weird? Have you seen that new lightsaber."

Marvel (and DC) released their movie dates and names to create hype, however, in doing so they also put themselves under the gun. We now expect these movies, and worst yet they have to find a way to keep us excited about these movies. They have done away with the rumor mill that used to churn about what movies were being announced, or shot, or cast, which sort of helped build public hype naturally. We now know what is coming years in advance, and we even know a lot of the actors that will be in those movies. So now studios need new ways to create hype, and thus they have gone back to the tried and true trailer. Only now they are setting release dates for them, building new anticipation, essentially hyping the very things they use to hype their movies. They keep the images we see in those trailers vaguely out of context, yet tantalizing: broadsabers (TM), and Hulkbuster armor, and Chris Pratt led raptor packs. They are feeding us breadcrumbs, but it's only making us hungrier than some hippos I once knew. So we dissect the trailers. We break them down, frame by frame, because we are always looking for that next big hype.

I'm not going to sit here and say any of this is really a bad thing. Hell, I'm as guilty of it as anyone else. I freely admit that. I watched that Avengers 2 trailer, several hundred times in a row, but when I got to the movie theater to see Interstellar, and the second to last trailer showed a molten metal hand rising up on a dark screen, I knew exactly what the trailer was. I had memorized it at that point, shot for shot, and you know what? I sat in that theater feeling a little empty watching it again. My normal feeling of goosebumps and nervous excitement was dulled. Yes it was on a bigger screen (IMAX in fact,) and had better sound than can be produced by my PC speakers, but something was gone. It felt different. I know that this trend of hyped up trailers and their "release dates" isn't going to wane anytime soon. If anything it will only increase from here on out, but I can't help lament at what we are losing. The experience of going to the theater will be just a little less magical. At least that's my opinion.