Movie trailers used to be pretty formulaic – just show the best bits – but, in the age of the internet viral, they're now works of art in themselves.
If you're looking for art or auteurship at the cinema, you're likely to be waiting for the main feature, not concentrating on the trailers for what were quaintly known as "coming attractions". As long as they have existed, trailers have been the tool of film marketing departments aiming solely to secure the maximum number of bums on seats. Experimentation with the form has not been a big part of the story. There have been brief flourishes of artistic advancement, such as the move towards fast-edit montages led by Kubrick in the early 1960s, and periodical oddities, like Hitchcock's personally hosted guided tour of the Bates Motel for Psycho, and the mock advertisement for the Ghostbusters' services, which led to the advertised phone number taking 1,000 calls an hour for six weeks in 1984. But the vast majority of studio-financed trailer-makers have played it safe, their audience-tested trailers following the basic three-act rule of set-up, jeopardy and emotional- or action-based blow-out.
Now, however, thanks mainly to that feral little monster, the internet, and one of its most recent and riotous offspring, the viral, there are strong signs of a creeping rebellion in trailer-making. The teams behind trailers for the likes of Cloverfield, The Dark Knight, District 9, Paranormal Activity and Inglourious Basterds have risen to the challenge of the new frontier, ushering in what might reasonably be considered a golden age of invention in the field. The future direction of film marketing is unclear, and that provides fertile ground for risk-taking – not because the studios have learned to stop worrying and take a punt, but because they're navigating unknown territory. It's not quite the wild west out there, but a comparison to the early days of rock'n'roll might stand up.
"The studios have had to learn to relax in terms of controlling film promo," says Ryan Parsons, owner of Traileraddict.com, a site that gathers and posts trailers. "The internet is wild. Things come out before they're supposed to, info is leaked, footage is leaked. The studios are just now learning how to exploit that, rather than try to curtail it. The marketing people I've talked to say that even when they're chasing down the source of a leak now, they know it doesn't really harm them – it all reminds people the film exists."
Trailers are immensely popular online. According to research by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, movie trailers rank third in popularity among the 10bn videos viewed online every year, after news and user-created video. The growth of social networking sites, and particularly the instant buzz of Twitter, in the last two years have moved the goalposts. That process has been further boosted by the development of movie virals – which count online-only videos and interactive "alternate reality" games among their techniques for sucking punters in. The street-smart trailer-makers are the ones involved in multi-platform campaigns for which the release of the trailer is either the climax or the launchpad.
JJ Abrams' Cloverfield trailer, released in July 2007, was a brilliant example of the latter. Shown in US cinemas before the blockbuster Transformers, this teaser used footage from what looked like a home movie featuring screaming, running crowds and explosions in New York. Flying in the face of the first commandment of film promo (consistently supported by market research) that the more the trailer explains and reveals, the more commercially effective it is, it was devoid of information and untitled – only a release date and the name of JJ Abrams appeared onscreen.
"In the case of Cloverfield the trailer started the viral," says Nick Butler, who runs the site movieviral.com. "People watched the trailer over and over to look for clues, because the whole thing was such a mystery. Some people thought it was about terrorism, or maybe it had something to do with Lost [Abrams's TV series]. The trailer sent people off to check out the associated website, thousands of people did exactly that and the online buzz grew like crazy. Over the next few months, we were sent all over the internet. In the end I saw the film four times, constantly looking for links between it and the trailer."
Cloverfield is a perfect example of a trailer that capitalised on the new, more demanding world in which trailers now operate. They must fight for attention online against hundreds of others, be available for viewing 24/7, and face the fact that while they might spark a rush of excitement, they can also cause a sigh of disappointment. Cloverfield also proved that for those studios willing to take the new challenges head on, the rewards could be plentiful. No surprise then that Sony moved in on the action, steering the team at LA's Create Advertising towards a similar approach for Neill Blomkamp's alien thriller District 9.
"The studio had a big online and billboard campaign planned," says David Stern, owner of Create. "They were working on the notion that maybe it was better to pose questions in the trailer than tell people everything. When we found out about their campaign, we actually ditched our first, more traditional, story-orientated, trailer for one that just implied that something is going on in District 9 but we're not telling you what. We even made two versions – one blurred the alien and didn't subtitle his words, so it really made people wonder what was going on."
The experiment paid off – District 9 took $37m on its opening weekend this August and stayed strong through the summer. Sony approached its early trailers for Roland Emmerich's 2012 in the same way, again backing them up with a wave of viral marketing.
Trailer-maker Mark Rance has been a victim of the studios' natural timidity in the past. His daring ideas for promos for The Prestige, which proposed to use the screen like a theatre stage, complete with red-curtain framing, were received with enthusiasm by director Christopher Nolan and his producer-partner Emma Thomas, but rejected by Touchstone Pictures. A mere year on however, he was involved in a campaign for The Dark Knight that saw the studios, increasingly aware of the possibilities for a film's extra-curricular online life, loosen up a little.
Rance was hired to direct a series of online trailers titled Gotham Tonight. They aired once a week for the six weeks leading up to the film's release and expanded on an ostensibly minor thread within it, prior knowledge of which was rewarded with a narrative pay-off in the movie.
The Dark Knight was accompanied by a wildly varied and imaginative viral which involved numerous websites, interactive games and a treasure hunt, climaxing with the Imax-hosted launch of a six-minute trailer showing the effervescent heist scene from the film (James Cameron went seven minutes better with the Imax-premiered Avatar trailer this August). Rance agrees that the dawn of virals and Twitter have forced the studios to experiment with trailers, but he firmly believes that their inherent conservatism will lead to a more homogenised approach once they get their heads around the territory.
"Clamping down is part of the system," he says. "They'll end up just copying other ideas that have worked. Of course a viral shouldn't be a repeat of another viral, it should be like improvised jazz, taking on its own life. But to call the studios cautious – that's a polite way of putting it."
As David Stern suggests, the most significant impact that Rance's "improv" virals have had on trailers has been to free them from a commitment to plot information. The best online trailers don't go beyond "teaser" territory, needing only to intrigue, or even confuse, to set film fans off on a detective's quest. This has allowed for some genuinely innovative and smart promo work, like the fake news report on Dr Manhattan that formed part of the alternative Watchmen universe, and the Coraline trailer in which Neil Gaiman gravely described the effects of koumpounophobia, the fear of buttons, which set the tone for his script.
Also fantastically curiosity-pricking was the trailer for the German war film Nation's Pride – "by Alois von Eichberg" – which seemed to come from nowhere when it debuted this August. Nation's Pride turned out to be the (Eli Roth-directed) film within the film of Inglourious Basterds and, apart from ramping up the Basterds-related buzz, it showed film fans that Tarantino was truly one of them, an enthusiast who had fun with the parallel online life of the movie.
Cheeringly, the incredible word of mouth around the hugely successful $11,000 budget horror Paranormal Activity – bolstered by what Hugo Grumbar, president of distribution at Icon Films, calls an "experience trailer" showing terrified audiences' reaction – proves that viral marketing is not restricted to top-end films. In fact imagination and original thinking is more crucial to the success of this kind of marketing than big bucks, as the mid-budget District 9 also showed.
Of course there are other, more subtle, ways of exploiting the opportunities that high-speed word of mouth presents and the ever-pioneering Disney Pixar is master of the "double hit". Pixar has always made pester-power-engendering trailers, full of high-speed adventure and snappy one-liners, then rewarded parents with the high quality of its finished films. Recently it has gone further, hitting unsuspecting mums and dads with mournful stories of broken-hearted widowers and a surprisingly faithful, highly literary Dickens adaptation, ensuring a whole new promotional afterlife for Up and A Christmas Carol after their release.
Grumbar admits he attempted a similar trick with Icon's Bridge to Terabithia. "I thought if we slightly missold the trailer as Narnia or something like that, people wouldn't feel cheated when they saw the film because it was satisfying for all kinds of audiences. Did it pay off? Absolutely."
