History and Content of Film Trailers

A film trailer is one of the most successful forms of marketing currently out there, they can get a person excited for a film they didn't even know about and the more times people watch them, the more excited they get for the film.

History

The first trailer shown in a movie theatre was in November 1913, when Broadway Producer Nils Granlund, produced a short promotional film for the musical "The Pleasure Seekers", shown at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. After this method was proven to be successful, it was then used to promote a new Charlie Chaplin film the following year. However these trailers were very different form the ones we know today, they used almost no footage from the film and instead used text to describe the story. It wasn't until the 1960's when montage editing of various clips of the film were used to promote the film, a technique pioneered by famous film Stanley Kubrick, a method that we still use up to this day.

Misleading

A common complaint of film trailers is that they often mislead people into believing one thing of a film when really it either plays a smaller role than marketed or is just omitted completely. The reason why people complain about this is because a lot of the time it's because that one element is the main reason why people even chose to see the film. Sometimes it's because the trailer has stylized a film to look like one thing when it's not. A good example of this is the film "Drive" which a lot of people complained that the trailer makes it out to be an action film when in reality it was a slow paced crime drama. One woman even tried to sue the producers of the film for this misleading trailer.

Spoilers

A second common complaint of film trailers is that they show far too much of the film, and that by the time people go to see it, they are already aware of all of the best parts. This is a very big problem especially for superhero films, due to the fact that they are the biggest box office hits of the 21st century, studios are constantly releasing trailers for them, sometimes up to 4-5 different trailers, so everybody knows the movie. An example of this is "The Amazing Spider-Man" where one fan took all of the trailers for that film and was able to make out 25 minutes worth of material from the 2 hour film.