Analysis: If you feel like film trailers are often too long and give too much away, there's a reason for that
Have you ever wondered why film trailers give so much away? Maybe you've even stopped watching them altogether to avoid being served the entire plot on a platter. You’re not alone. Even director Rian Johnson encouraged audiences not to watch the Knives Out trailer if they wanted to 'come in clean’.
Some of the very best trailers have nearly no sound or dialogue, like Alien (1979), while others do just the right amount to introduce you to new characters and surprise you with the return of fan favourites, like Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). But the very worst, of which there are too many to list, feel like they give it all away by offering up a comprehensive synopsis. It’s been said some are even deliberately terrible .
In 2014, NATO (not that NATO, but the National Association of Theater Owners in the US) called for trailer lengths to be cut by 30 seconds, reportedly because theatre owners believed trailers were often too long and gave away too much of the plot for audiences. A cursory look at some current trailers would suggest nothing much has changed. In fact, although they've have evolved over time, trailers have stayed pretty much the same length historically.
From Rotten Tomatoes Trailers, Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien
And maybe there's good reason for that. "When you're deciding among all the different films that you're going to see, you're likely to see the ones that made that made you feel something [from watching the trailer]," says Dr Brendan Rooney, Assistant Professor in the UCD School of Psychology and Director of the Media and Entertainment Psychology Lab. "So if you turn to your friend before the film and say, 'oh, that looks great’, what you’re really saying when it comes to film is it looks like I would feel something - fear or joy or sadness - when watching it. The best predictor for that is what you felt while watching the trailer." In order to get you to feel something while watching a trailer, you need "a little bit more," he says.
That’s why trailers often have their own story arc to prompt feelings in audience members, something which can also be achieved with the help of the score. "If you can bring them on a bit of an emotional ride in a trailer, then they're more likely to feel something and more likely to want to go and see the film. You can't really do that with a very short clip, so you need to tell a little mini story."
The trailer, usually a minute to three minutes long, is in its essence a piece of advertising and a key marketing tool for films designed to compel you to go see the film when it gets released. Which explains why we in some cases get trailers for the trailers (teasers). This is often the case with big franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the films themselves also contain ‘easter eggs’ at the end, teasing the next instalment.
From VOX, Iconic movie trailers explained by a trailer editor
Trailers have been around since 1913 and have changed overtime from something that was shown after a film at the cinema (hence, something that ‘trailed’ the main event) to being part of a packet of advertising shown to us ahead of the film we’ve bought a ticket for. These days, the cinema might not even be where you’ll see a trailer for the first time and it’s increasingly difficult to get our attention.
Research on spoilers adds an interesting dimension in the context of film trailers, because it appears people actually like knowing what they’re getting and being told what to expect. "People go a long way to avoid spoilers, they can get really upset when things are spoiled for them," says Rooney. Yet research done by Leavitt and Christenfeld at the University of California, San Diego has shown spoilers don't spoil stories but seem to actually increase enjoyment, "because knowing the ending allows them to appreciate aesthetic elements instead of guessing what will happen, or because knowing the ending increases fluency by enabling readers to correctly interpret clues and events," they said. But there’s also other research which suggests that it's obvious that unspoiled stories were more suspenseful, adds Rooney.
Rooney also highlights research from Thomsen and Heiselberg at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) which found that when audience members demonstrated a physiological response (‘arousal’) towards the trailer in the form of two peaks, a peak early on and a peak towards the end of the trailer, those were the trailers that were rated with a higher intention of actually seeing the film and promoted storage in long-term memory. The authors said that "there is no doubt that the most significant factor is whether the content or theme of the film interests the viewer, but the craft behind the production of a trailer is also an important factor."
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In further research carried out by Rooney in collaboration with Heiselberg and other colleagues at SDU, a group of people were randomly assigned to watch trailers and their facial responses were recorded. They also self-reported their emotions while watching. "The difference between our research and [the research from SDU], was that it seemed like the two peaks of physiological arousal were indexes of different processes. In our study it looks like that first peak was attention or interest, and the second one was emotional engagement."
"We’re still analysing the data, but our argument is that the trailer has to capture your attention in the first place and then it needs to do a little bit of work to tell a little bit of a story, so that it can end with some sort of an emotional response," Rooney explains.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
