Companion piece to the Coming Attractions segment in episode 19 of the podcast.
Trailers. Teasers. Coming Attractions. Whatever you call them, they’re impossible to avoid if you spend any time at the local multiplex–especially now that the studios are paying to have their trailers run. These days it’s not unusual to sit through as many as ten trailers in a single screening, and far from being an enticement, the whole experience feels more like an endurance test.
There is a strange inverse logic to trailers. A bad trailer is often an indication of a good film that can’t easily be reduced to a few eye-grabbing scenes. A good trailer, on the other hand, can be the sign of a film that needs to give everything away in the hopes of luring in an audience. While these trailers appear to promise more, they have already ransacked the films they’re promoting for every laugh line and action set-piece in them. Trailers can also act as a kind of shell game, slanting the expectations of a film that’s tested poorly. A trailer can draw you in with the promise of one kind of movie, only to have it turn out to be something completely different when you actually pay to see it.
Cinema Misfits 