Movie Trailers Have Gotten Worse. Why Aren’t Studios Having Fun With Them?

I know the trailer for David Fincher’s 2010 drama, “The Social Network,” by heart.

We hear the soft sounds of a children’s choir singing Radiohead’s “Creep” as a montage of mundane Facebook interactions flashes across the screen. When the voices hit the lyric “you’re so very special,” the camera zooms out of a pixelated image to reveal the face of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg. It’s almost a minute in when footage from the actual movie starts to play and Zuckerberg chatters about wanting to get into Harvard final clubs. From there it’s a quick escalation of tension that reaches a peak when Andrew Garfield strides onscreen screaming, “Mark!” That’s when the tagline appears: “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”

Just thinking about it, I get chills. “The Social Network” is a great movie. The “Social Network” trailer is also a great movie. It just happens to be only 2 minutes and 30 seconds long.

Movie trailers are, at their most basic level, marketing, of course. But they can also be so much more, little short films unto themselves, defined by excellent editing and the ability to create a feeling of thrilling anticipation. I love a great trailer, yet I can’t help but feel that there’s been a drought recently. And I’m not alone. My social media feeds are flooded with trailer-related complaints. (Currently one of the main targets is the trailer for “Speak No Evil,” which has been charged with showing the entire movie.)

With studios scrambling to fill theaters, they seem to be struggling to figure out what kind of trailers will draw audiences. Instead of taking chances, they are making creatively inert spots. There are trailers that give away too much (“Trap”), trailers that are disappointingly generic (“A Quiet Place: Day One”) and trailers that feel tonally off (“Gladiator II”). Mostly, no one is having any fun with them anymore.

Throughout Hollywood history, trailers have taken many forms. In the industry’s early days, the appeal to the audience was direct. The trailer for “Citizen Kane” spends about 30 seconds on a shot of a microphone descending while the director and star Orson Welles explains in voice-over that “what follows is supposed to advertise our first motion picture.”