The point remains: A mediocre trailer really gives no indication of the quality or enjoyability of a movie. It just tells us the quality of the marketing team.
Eh, maybe. Certainly that’s nothing proven today by pointing to trailers from three decades ago.
These days, it’s often said that the trailer “was the best part of the movie”. If a modern trailer fails to interest or make you laugh/get excited/grow tense/etc depending on the genre then I don’t have a lot of hope for the film itself. If you don’t have enough material to put together two minutes of good stuff, what are you going to do for 110 minutes?
I can think of lots of comedies in the past five years where the trailer made it look fun but the movie itself was no great shakes, with the few “good” bits in the trailer. I can’t really think of a comedy from the past five years where I thought the trailer made it look uninteresting but it was actually very funny. That means more to me than the state of trailer production in the early 80s.
What comedies from the last five years did you find funny?
Why do you ask? If it’s so we can go back and litigate whether or not I found their trailers amusing – not interested.
Of course. Why wouldn’t you be interested in that? You are the one who made the point.
Because my interest in noting the “eh” nature of the Ghostbusters trailer is probably far less than your interest in defending it. This being Cafe Society, I’m comfortable with making a casual point without entering into a debate over which trailers I find funny (as weird as that would be – are you going to argue that I felt otherwise?)
We weren’t even talking about the Ghostbusters trailer anymore. We were talking about the effectiveness of modern trailers, which is a subject I find interesting.
But if you don’t feel like elaborating your own point, that’s your right.
People are judging the film on quite literally 2% of it that they’ve seen so far (assuming the finished film is two hours long). As has been mentioned upthread, if people base their impressions on trailers alone, the original Star Wars is a steaming pile and The Phantom Menace is not. The “thumbs down” reactions to the video are outnumbering the “thumbs up” by nearly 2 to 1.
If your issue is with the quality of the trailer, it’s probably best to first see if it accurately represents the movie.
If your problem is not so much with the trailer but that the parts have been recast with actors who happen to have XX chromosome sets, that’s another issue entirely. I think that the cast involved has a ton of talent, and I’m immensely looking forward to Ghostbusters (2016).
New trailer:
An improvement. Still not my thing.
Yeah, big improvement to me.
Still too much McCarthy in it. Which is to say, any McCarthy.
Much better trailer. Not sure it’s enough to sell me on the whole movie, though. I’ll wait for reviews.
Definitely a much better trailer. Too bad it does not include some some sort of mind-scrub that removes the memory of the previous one.
Seriously? That’s practically the same trailer, only with far more Chris Hemsworth. (Presumably because it’s the Australian trailer and he’s Australian.) I thought the first trailer was fine, but unless you’re a huge Chris Hemsworth fan I don’t see how this one is a major improvement.
Tonally, it’s slightly different, with different edits in places. But I tend to agree.
Look at the black character. She doesn’t say, “Dur, I’m stoopid about science” in this one, like she did in the first; she just says, “I know New York.” So she’s characterized by her knowledge, not her ignorance. And her other laugh line isn’t a pretend faith-healing; it’s her getting pissed off about people treating her different from the white ladies.
The things that made me cringe in the first trailer are not in this one.
She doesn’t say she’s stupid in the American trailer, and I don’t know where you’re getting “pretend faith-healing” from. The face-slapping bit was obviously a parody of the exorcism in The Exorcist…and also apparently worked. These two bits are not entirely unproblematic (the one black character is the only non-scientist, and she’s also violent!) and I personally preferred the stage-diving gag, but at least one person in this thread mentioned the face-slapping bit as a highlight of the American trailer.
Maybe not, but there’s a dumb boob joke at the end of the Australian trailer that wasn’t in the American trailer at all. So again, I’m not seeing how it’s a major improvement.
“Casting out of spirits” is a pretty old faith healer dodge. I didn’t twig to “The power of Patty compels you!” as being an Exorcist reference right away - I thought it was a riff on evangelicalism in general - and, of course, it’s the black character who gets the reference to charismatic Christianity.
And while she doesn’t say she’s stupid in the other trailer, she does say, “You guys are good at that science stuff, but I know New York!” So, on the one hand, you have three white people who have invested significant amounts of time in esoteric and highly technical fields… versus a black person who lives in a city. She’s not calling herself stupid, but her presentation in the first trailer comes across as very anti-intellectual, and it’s very troubling that they made that character the black character. The movie itself, of course, has a lot more time to contextualize and justify that character choice, so I’m not going to say it’s a problem in the film itself. But that was a very sour note in the first trailer for me, and the fact that the second trailer downplays it is in its favor.
They also changed “four scientists saved the world” to “four friends saved the world,” which is…slightly more accurate, I suppose.
I also liked this one better. Surprisingly so, much better. It almost seemed to speak directly to some of the criticisms, and maybe an indication that the whole thing might be a little smarter and more self-aware than the first trailer made it seem. I actually liked the stage-diving gag and “I don’t know if it’s my race or gender, but I’m pissed” and the “dumb boob joke” at the end actually seemed to me to skewer people’s hangups over the Ghostbusters being women, Hemsworth’s character representing the people making a big deal about it and not quite getting the idea that they can simply be “Ghostbusters,” not “GhostBUSTers.”