Daily Dispatch

Movie trailers are proving real spoilsport­s by revealing way too much

- By TIM ROBEY

WHEN did film trailers become things to flee or blot out? They used to be the best bit about a trip to the cinema – a perfect compilatio­n of tempting plot-teasers in stylish 60second servings, drawing you in without spoiling the surprise.

Even in their heyday that was easier said than done. Now it’s positively a lost art. Instead of whetting our appetites, trailers today do everything possible to ruin them.

They go on too long: the new Dunkirk preview lasts a monumental seven minutes. They give away too much: watch the teaser for Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled and there’s no point paying to watch the full movie.

The once-cherished film-making skill of dispensing just enough to lure us into a story or mood has, sadly, been thrown under a bus.

Trailers now exhibit the desperate oversell of many movies themselves, franticall­y seeking to grab and hold our fickle attention. It’s not just their content, it’s their numbers: they come in waves. These days trailers themselves have trailers.

Some very short previews get released before the film has even finished shooting, and end up containing footage that never makes it into the final cut. So each successive session of tub-thumping further blights the ultimate viewing experience.

Comedies are often the worst victims. It’s become something of a cliché to complain that all the best jokes are in the trailer.

Meanwhile, horror trailers actually set out to make every new picture look identical to the last, rather than playing up the (far more frightenin­g) idea that something unknown awaits around the corner.

This is the marketing of safety in numbers, the deliberate reassuranc­e to potential audiences that genre boxes will be ticked, that they will know exactly what they’re letting themselves in for.

The great, cheesy trailers of the Eighties and Nineties were in themselves generic, but the current overkill makes you nostalgic for that era when star names, splashed across the screen, counted for more; when the music was endearingl­y pastiche; and every trailer was introduced by a voice-over man in sonorous, rich – if faintly ludicrous – bass tones.

Now voice-over man is banished. The comedian Lake Bell made a sweet indie comedy about the voiceover game, naturally titled In a World... Alas, it’s a world gone by.

This is another way of saying that personalit­y used to be a great selling tool. Now, the more impersonal the approach, the more comfortabl­e the studios are.

When Psycho (1960) was about to come out, Alfred Hitchcock filmed himself walking around the set. It was a long tease, but a delightful one – finishing, inevitably, with him pulling back the shower curtain. These days, Janet Leigh’s entire demise would be fair game for marketing purposes. Springing a shock, let alone a shock in your film’s first half? Forget it.

If you really want to escape the revelation of all those plot points, the only safe policy is to arrive at the cinema 15 minutes after the stated start time and skip the trailers altogether.

That’s if you have managed to stay off the internet, too. And not gone anywhere near Twitter. Essentiall­y, the film-going experience will only have some twists and turns in store if you become a hermit.

Not that all is lost. Cinema feeds off itself.

So eventually some new, hip director will look back at trailers as they used to be – swift, tantalisin­g glimpses through the keyhole – and make them cool again. Then we’ll all come running back, to watch the show before the show. — The Daily Telegraph

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Picture: iStock
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