The decline of movie trailers

The new trailer for the movie Ironman is out. Watching the trailer, you don?t so much get a sense that they are giving you hints and teases of the movie, but rather that they are giving you a complete and succinct summary of the entire film, from the opening sequences to the final battle scene. Matthew Yglesias repeated a joke about this: “Wildly Popular Iron Man Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film.”

This new form of movie trailer is so exasperating. You get to see (and if you are sitting in a cinema its whether you like it or not) the entire plot fold out, leaving very little left for you to actually enjoying during the film. Christopher Orr at The New Republic also finds this annoying and decided to review a movie solely on the basis of the trailer before seeing the movie. His review is here. I won’t be surprising anyone to say that he gets it pretty right.

I can only assume that the blockbuster movie genre is becoming so generic that the plots in all these films are familiar to the public and that the studios think they are giving nothing away by revealing the plots. The reason that the public want to see the film is for the special effects and individual scenes and so by covering the entire scope of the film’s plot they get to show off all the juicy bits of the key scenes in the trailer.

In some ways this makes a lot of sense for the action films, which at their essence are a few minutes of multi-millions dollar computer generated special effects, with some poorly written linking scenes to drag it out to the need 80 minute film. I have always thought that there is an opportunity to for someone to create condensed versions of these films. A bit like the Reader’s Digest condensed novel, you could have a condensed film with just the 20 minutes of special effects, maybe with cut screens with the text “And then the fell in love and then the aliens landed” to bridge the missing parts.