CAN WE TALK ABOUT?
TRAILER TROUBLE SHOULD SNEAK PEEKS PROMISE WHAT A FILM DOES NOT DELIVER?
Released in 2019, Danny Boyle’s Yesterday imagined a world without The Beatles. Now, another absence has hit the headlines: Ana de Armas. Two US movie fans saw her sitting there in the trailer. Then they rented the movie, only to discover her scenes gone, and set out to sue Universal for false advertising.
A judge’s ruling that they can proceed has stirred debate about their chances and, indeed, about trailers. Can a trailer be a standalone entity? Or is it a commercially binding promise, beholden to ticket buyers’ expectations?
As trailer watchers know, trailer-to-film edits are not rare. Good trailers often mislead, without necessarily misrepresenting. Sometimes that involves deliberately excluding footage from the film; witness early plugs for
Jurassic Park, T2 and Trainspotting (Renton on the rails). Sometimes it’s about spoiler protection, as in Avengers: Endgame’s secretive tease and Spider-Man: No Way
Home’s Lizard-punching trickery, or about cool images: remember Homecoming’s flight-formation Spidey and Iron Man? Elsewhere, trailers from 1998’s The (other)
Avengers to 2016’s Suicide Squad teased material later carved out by studio cuts.
Given the way trailers are made, it’s perhaps surprising more don’t feature material that ends up snipped. Trailers will often be outsourced to agencies, sometimes working tightly with directors, sometimes not. While
‘MORE TEASE, LESS REVEAL COULD BE A WORKABLE WAY FORWARD’
trailer houses are expected to honour tone, theme and content, they often can’t know for sure which angle or line reading will reach the film after editing and post-production. After all, the filmmakers often won’t. Remember
Rogue One’s “I rebel” clunker? Snipped. Or The Thing’s big arrival in 2015’s Fantastic Four, which went on to clobber cutting-room floors?
Will a de Armas-sized absence be deemed a more significant gap? Will the lawsuit set a precedent for further customer complaints? While, surely, no one would argue that trailers are responsible for the end product, the
Yesterday case perhaps reminds us that trailers can be snapshots of filmmaking in flux, or a craft unto themselves, rather than just collages of giveaways.
Even if cases of megastars falling out of films post-trailer/pre-release are rare, studios may feel honour-bound to trail more cautiously in future. Maybe more tease, less reveal could be a workable way forward.