SALT LAKE CITY — Rey stands alone in the forest. Her eyes are distant, empty, glazed over. The “Star Wars” heroine whips out her lightsaber. It glows red in the darkness. The lightsaber snaps, flips and spirals into a double-bladed weapon.
This is the final moment of the most recent “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” trailer. It leaves you, your friends and the entire “Star Wars” fandom hanging, wanting and itching for more. Questions squirm in your brain: Has Rey joined the dark side? Is Rey a Sith Lord? Is this just a vision from The Force? Has she become Dark Rey? And then the internet pops off.
Time magazine writes a second-by-second breakdown of the trailer. The Guardian explains the history of lightsabers. The Deseret News weighs in with a number of pieces. YouTube videos spring up. Social media goes bonkers. Retweets. Likes. Shares. Follows. And, somewhere, a young “Star Wars” fan wonders, “Can I get that lightsaber for Christmas?”
That single moment in a brief trailer (which told us literally nothing about the film) is a microcosm of how movie trailers have been carefully built and manicured to create theories, inspire content, drive social media discussion, drum up debates, proliferate marketing material and, if there’s time, get butts into seats. It’s a moment meant to drum up reactions from “Star Wars” fans, social media and pop culture communities.
Trailers play a big role in Hollywood today. Films don’t get green-lit without them, experts told the Deseret News. Film production is about 50% marketing and 50% filmmaking. Most marketers have a trailer — or at least an idea on how to sell the film — in their minds from the start.
“So the trailer is a big deal before film is even made, imagining what that’s going to look like and imagining how it’s going to circulate, how people might react to it,” said Shawn Shimpach, a film and media studies professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in an interview with the Deseret News.
But more than that, the movie trailer can create a cultural moment for fans and the country at large.
“The trailer itself is not just an advertisement, but it’s an event in and of itself,” said Alexandra Keller, professor of media studies at Smith College, in an interview with the Deseret News. “It’s a cultural moment of its own.”
From ads to marketing to something more
Movie trailers weren’t always so epic. They once were practical.
During the Great Depression, movie trailers were designed to get people into seats — and that’s it. Fewer people attended movies — given that they had less money to spare — so trailers aimed to help moviegoers make financially responsible decisions about what movies they’d watch, Keller said.
“You have scarce economic resources. Is this the one you want to go to? Is this worth your money as much as your time, right? It really is an ad. It’s not all that different from an ad for, you know, Campbell’s soup,” Keller said.
Trailers then evolved into pieces of content that highlighted the largeness of screen, touted big stars, explained the plot and tried to encourage specific audiences to attend certain movies. For example, Alfred Hitchcock movie trailers highlighted the “whodunit” question, encouraging moviegoers to find out all the answers by seeing the show live, Keller said. Similarly, “Titanic” trailers wanted to convince moviegoers that “Titanic” wasn’t a typical James Cameron film, who, at the time, was well-know for sci-fi epics “Alien” and “The Terminator.” So the trailer focused on the romance, the corsets, the aesthetics and relationships and less on action and drama, Keller said.
But it was the first “Star Wars” film that aired its trailer with licensing, toys, lightsabers and everything in between in mind. The idea of marketing your film to tie in with Happy Meals started with the original “Star Wars,” Keller said.
“Star Wars” was the first film franchise, she said, to placate to its fans and embrace the fan culture bubbling beneath the surface.
Moving forward.
Fast forward to 2019 where movie trailers are “a completely different animal,” Keller said. Experts agree movie trailers have adapted to evolving media in order to connect better with fans and communities centered around films.
Shimpach, the media studies professor from UMass, told the Deseret News that movie trailers have been reconstructed into 90-second or two-minute clips “perfect for circulating digitally” so that they work on YouTube.
“They’re kind of perfect for watching on your phone or on your gaming console or circulating via social media,” he said.
Production companies have started cutting trailers with new media in mind, he said, since most people can watch them on their phone. And that change, he said, has increased their value. More people can watch movie trailers now wherever they are, which means they reach more people more often, increasing their value for filmmakers and studios.
Many of the most-watched movie trailers since the internet became a thing have been released in the last decade. “Avengers: Endgame” broke the record for most views in a 24-hour period with 289 million views, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Avengers: Infinity War” held the record with 230 million views before that. “The Lion King” teaser sits right behind with 224.6 million views. The trailer for “Spider-Man: Far From Home” broke Sony Pictures Entertainment’s record with 135.2 million views in 24 hours, per Deadline.
You could make the argument the increase in trailer views has risen with the rise of YouTube, social media and internet accessibility. But trailers have created a culture around themselves where people are anxiously awaiting the new teaser or first official trailer before the movie even hits.
“Fan culture has really exploded with the internet. It’s always been around, but it was just harder for fans to find each other and to communicate,” Keller said.
“Now, you’re salivating for the trailer itself,” she added.
Directors and filmmakers have become more deliberate about the movies they make. Blockbuster movies deserve blockbuster trailers. Disney will pour millions of dollars into a “Star Wars” trailer, Keller said. Lesser-known filmmakers will throw something together.
“Trailers have clearly become just like movies themselves,” Keller said.
“It’s been quite a long time since, certainly, blockbuster trailers have been about just you going to the movies, especially the serial ones like we know,” she said.
Movie trailers offer exclusive experiences in multiple ways. The trailers released at San Diego Comic-Con and D23 Expo, for example, show that there’s still a culture of “being there” to see the trailer released live. Even people who aren’t at those events can see trailers soon after through leaked footage, Shimpach said. Or, in the case of “Star Wars” this last week, a company can drop the trailer hours after its original viewing, creating two unique experiences for fans.
“So even those of us who can’t go to these conventions and can’t travel and sort of participate in that way, we can feel like we’re invested and we’re participating in part of the fan culture, and even a little bit of the sort of industry insight by having almost immediate access to these things that you know just dropped earlier that day,” Shimpach said.
The immediacy of movie trailers allows online communities, fandoms and social networks to unite around a singular event, too.
“And so it creates this sort of sense of participatory culture, like you are part of the excitement of the reveal of the cultural event that’s coming out in a few months,” Shimpach said.
Catering to fans
The No. 1 question directors must answer is: Who is your audience?
“Who are the trailers talking to? What are they talking about? And what is it (that) they want you to do that is far beyond just going to the movies and watching that film?” Keller asked.
From there, it’s easy for directors and producers to allow fans to create content that will help films grow.
“It’s really more about activating the fan, as a kind of decoder, as an interlocutor, as a co-author, in some way,” Keller said. “Trailers are puzzles to be decoded.”
“It wouldn’t even be cynical to suggest that that what is happening is knowing that other people will do this for you. You can save a lot of money,” she said.
For example, Netflix’s “Bird Box” debuted without too much marketing or hype. Sure, there were articles that announced its release. But nothing over-the-top. And yet, the trailer spawned millions of memes and social media posts. About 45 million people watched it on opening weekend, according to Netflix.
This isn’t new. Fans have created content for years. Fan fiction, after all, has been a tool that fans use to interact with other fans, for example. It allowed communities to come together to celebrate a film. Major franchises like “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” and “Harry Potter” have had online fan communities for decades.
Creating content after a movie trailer drops — blog posts, YouTube theory videos, long social media posts — is of a similar nature. It allows fandom to interact as a community.
“This is a form of cultural production, community building creativity, for sure. And people get a genuine sort of pleasure and enjoyment (by) interacting and expressing themselves (in ways) that might be otherwise difficult to communicate to other people or to form communities around,” Shimpach said.
“And the only risk in that is that you can’t control it because the social media world will do what it wants with what you’ve given it. And if they don’t like it, they’ll say so.”
Battling negative reactions
No trailer is perfect. And sometimes, a bad trailer can be a good thing, Keller said.
“And it almost doesn’t matter if the fans are saying, ‘Oh, that’s lame.’ No publicity is bad publicity. Even bad publicity drums it up,” she said.
But negative reaction to a trailer matters. It can be the difference between your film being successful or not. It can highlight flaws, offensive content and issues that filmmakers and studios may have overlooked.
For example, Twitter cried out in distaste after the debut of the “Sonic the Hedgehog” trailer, which showed the titular character with sneakers, human-like muscles and just an entirely bad look. Jeff Fowler, the director behind the film, later announced they would make a change.
“The message is loud and clear,” he said. “You aren’t happy with the design and you want changes. It’s going to happen. Everyone at Paramount and Sega are fully committed to making this character the BEST he can be.”
Global audiences need to be considered, too. If something in the trailer turns off a moviegoer in China, then the film is potentially alienating itself from one of the largest markets in the world. China’s market size and potential for profits can’t big ignored.
The release of “Doctor Strange” presented such a dilemma for Marvel. There were some complaints that Marvel picked British actress Tilda Swinton for the role of the Ancient One, a character who is Tibetan in the Marvel comics.
But “Doctor Strange” screenwriter C. Robert Cargill explained the choice was deliberate. He didn’t want to keep Chinese fans from seeing the film.
“The Ancient One was a racist stereotype who comes from a region of the world that is in a very weird political place. He originates from Tibet, so if you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that he’s Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people,” he told The New York Times.
There was a risk of “the Chinese government going, ‘Hey, you know one of the biggest film-watching countries in the world? We’re not going to show your movie because you decided to get political,’” he said.
The “Sonic” and “Doctor Strange” examples show how there’s a shifting dynamic between directors, fans and producers, where filmmakers release trailers to receive feedback for their film before it ever hits theaters, Shimpach said.
And that, Shimpach said, is the immediate future for movie trailers — a more cohesive relationship between fans and directors.
“So there’s a sort of a shifting relationship, I think, between some of the studios, some of the filmmakers and audiences that trailer is allowing, because of the way that it’s circulating and commented on, and becomes part of a cultural moment long before the film was released.”
“It’s shifting the relationship, I would say, between how films are marketed and maybe even how films are made,” Shimpach said.
The future of movie trailers
So what does the future of movie trailers look like? There will be a growing relationship between fans and filmmakers, as the latter seeks input on their films from the former.
But there’s also a technological future to consider. The future of movie trailers includes increasing the various ways trailers circulate online, Shimpach said.
He said he’s heard of experiments where companies are testing trailer releases through wearables (technology you wear on your body, like a FitBit) and augmented reality.
“With phones now, I think there’s a belief that one of the next things that the technology of phones are going to do is augmented reality. And movie trailers want to be positioned to be part of that as it emerges,” Shimpach said.
The future of movie trailers can be found in the past. Trailers will always come back to answering questions about why audiences need to see a movie and always hit on merchandizing and advertising possibilities.
Movie trailers will always aim to bring people into theaters. Movie trailers are important, but not more important than selling tickets, Shimpach said. He said movie trailers need to be a cultural event, though, to be successful.
So, are the movie trailers more important than the films themselves?
“They’re super important. But ultimately, they’re not more important than whether you pay a box office ticket, or pay to stream it, or pay to buy the Blu-ray or whatever. At some point you should pay because that’s ultimately the businesses they’re in,” Shimpach said.
“The trailer, if it’s successful, is really important because it needs to create a conversation and a cultural event,” he added. “Paying to see the movie is sort of the natural outcome of a larger set of experiences that are being created.”
Or, as Keller put it, “The answer is a little bit yes. And a little bit no.”