On the death of the trailer

The film trailer used to be a compressed argument for why an audience should spend two hours watching a specific film. It was a rhetorical form as old as the industry itself, and the best trailers had a genuine craft — a hook, a tonal register, a promise the film could keep. Something has gone wrong with the form in the last five years, and the trailers currently being released for major films are, on average, worse than the trailers released a decade ago.

The most visible problem is spoilers. Contemporary trailers routinely give away half the plot, most of the good jokes, and any twist that arrives before the final act. The internal logic is a marketing one: audiences reportedly respond to more information rather than less, and platforms optimise for click-through rather than surprise. The rational-audience assumption may be right in the short term and is almost certainly wrong in the long term — a trailer that gives away the film reduces the value of the film to the viewer who has seen it.

The second problem is tonal collapse. Most major-studio trailers are cut to the same rhythm — three short setup beats, a needle-drop, a montage of the biggest action moments, a musical sting, a title card. It is a recipe, and once you notice the recipe you cannot unsee it. Independent trailers, especially A24's, still occasionally break the pattern — but even they have converged on a smaller number of moves than they used to have. The form has narrowed, and narrower forms produce worse arguments.

The counter case is that trailers are a marketing artifact, not an artistic one, and that judging them by aesthetic standards is a category confusion. Marketing exists to sell tickets, and if the current form sells tickets efficiently it is doing its job. There is some truth to this. But the assumption that current trailers are selling tickets efficiently is itself questionable — theatrical box office has softened, per-title marketing spend has grown, and the return on trailer views has arguably deteriorated. The recipe is not, in fact, working as well as its defenders claim.

The best recent trailers — the Killers of the Flower Moon teaser, the first Barbie trailer, the initial teaser for The Zone of Interest — all worked by breaking the recipe. Each made an argument, each preserved surprise, and each converted an unusually high fraction of trailer views into ticket sales. The industry should notice the pattern. Trailers that respect the audience's intelligence are, still, the ones that work best.