Buzz
In the 1993 trailer for Free Willy, a movie about a boy attempting to rescue a whale, viewers discover that—spoiler—he manages to set Willy free. Similarly, the 1994 Speed trailer, with Keanu Reeves racing against time to defuse a bomb on a bus, shows the bus exploding from a distance. And in the 2000 Cast Away preview, one of the most infamous spoilers of all time, we learn that Tom Hanks—after spending a great deal of time stranded on an island—eventually escapes.
It seems that movie trailers have only become more blatant in recent years. In the 2015 Terminator: Genisys trailer, the hero, John Connor, is—yet another spoiler—revealed to be a robot.
So why does Hollywood seem so determined to strip away any sense of mystery from their film previews?
It turns out we have no one to blame but ourselves. Or, more precisely, focus groups.
Studios typically outsource trailer creation to specialized editing and marketing firms. Multiple versions of a trailer are created and then shown to test audiences to determine what appeals to them most. Marketing expert David Singh explains that audiences generally prefer more—more action, more drama, and more spoilers.
"The competition is fierce out there," Singh told Marketplace in 2019. "You’re vying for people’s attention on every platform you can imagine. You have to give them enough to make them excited about it."
When creating these trailers, major moments are often used to elicit strong responses from audiences and showcase the uniqueness of the film being promoted. When Singh worked on the 2015 film The Martian, starring Matt Damon as a stranded astronaut on Mars, marketing teams had to address the fact that Damon had played a similar role in the 2014 film Interstellar. To generate buzz, they felt it was necessary to highlight the film’s key themes, including the fact that Damon would likely find a way to escape his predicament.
For Terminator: Genisys, director Alan Taylor mentioned there were concerns about distinguishing this installment from the previous four Terminator films. "I know there was a tricky calculation happening with the marketers to decide if revealing John Connor as a machine was the right call," he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. "They wanted to send a clear message to a cautious audience that something new was coming, that they were entering fresh territory. They feared people would think this was just a reboot, but none of us wanted to redo two perfect James Cameron movies. They felt they had to do something groundbreaking to shift how the film was perceived."
Taylor mentioned having "unpleasant conversations" regarding the trailer revealing too much. However, some filmmakers are in favor of the more-is-more approach. Director Robert Zemeckis defended the Cast Away trailer by arguing that audiences prefer to know everything before watching. "We’ve learned from studying movie marketing that people really want to know exactly what they’re going to see before they watch the film," he said. "It’s just the way it is. As a movie lover, film student, scholar, and director, I don’t agree with that. But it’s like McDonald’s. The reason McDonald’s is so successful is because there are no surprises. You know exactly what you’ll get. Everyone knows the menu."
Despite the backlash, this strategy seems to be effective. Jason Blum, the producer behind Blumhouse and some of the most successful horror films in recent years—including Paranormal Activity (2007), Get Out (2017), David Gordon Green's Halloween (2018), and The Invisible Man (2020)—has said that this technique is, like Michael Myers, a necessary evil.
"People dislike it, but almost everyone who says they don’t like it still ends up seeing the movie," Blum told Insider in 2020. "The trailer isn’t really for those who are already invested, but for those on the fence. One of the ways to get them to go is to show them a lot of the film in the trailer. In fact, I think we should’ve shown even more of the film in The Invisible Man trailer."
