TMI in movie trailers

In My Humble Opinion
1

no, this has nothing to do with popping zits or sexual liasons with dogs. Contain your dissappointment.

I want to know what you think about the previews telling too much information about the movie. For example, Days of Thunder, from 1992 I believe. I remember that preview. Tom Cruise is a racecar driver who loves to win. He gets involved romantically with Nicole Kidman and then, during one of the races, crashes his car and needs to be rushed to the hospital. Never saw the movie. Why should I? I just saw the 2 minute version of it.

What Lies Beneath? Well, obviously nothing. You told me the whole plot again.

Cast Away. I liked the original previews soooo much better. The one where it ends with him screaming “Hello? Anyone?” not the one where we know for a fact he’s gotten off the island. Where’s the suspense in that? Now the only reason I’d consider going to this is because I enjoy Tom Hanks as an actor.

OTOH, previews that show nothing annoy me as well. I’m not going to see a movie just because there was one shot of a spaceship for Independence Day that was shown 6 months before the movie’s release.

So where’s the middle ground? And is purposely crossing it bad?

2

Yeah, I was also disappointed that they showed the previews of Tom Hank’s character having made it back to civilization.

3

You may have been tricked. I hear “What Lies Beneath” has a red herring in the trailer to steer you wrong.

And apparently, “Cast Away” isn’t about Tom Hanks on a desert island, but the redemption and rebirth that come after being rescued. Maybe they changed it because they didn’t want a “Coyote Ugly” trailer. But I, too, preferred the first version.

–Tim

4

one of the things that inspired this thread, other than the previews themselves, was a quote by Robert Zemekis:

Well I, for one, do not want to see everything. I want to learn enough to know what the movie is about without giving anything away. This shouldn’t be that difficult to do. ? The Crying Game was, relatively, a smashing success and it depended on the audience NOT telling people what it was about. People went to Presumed Innocent, se7en, and The Usual Suspects en masse specifically because they knew there would be twists in it that the previews never even hinted at.

Besides, while I happen to love Zemekis’ films, how can HE love them with that attitude? If I, as a filmmaker, started to refer to movies as a process akin to McDonalds I would seriously have to take a step back and look at what I was doing. Maybe the solution is to change the public’s attitude, not pander to it.

5

Hijack, Ender, believe me, you missed nothing. As a matter of fact, I think the trailer had more plot than the actual movie. The only things that stuck with me about that movie are 1) I knew so-and-so and this-guy and that-guy in NASCAR were the basis of such-and-such and t’other-man and hopalong-so-so in the movie, so that was semi-interesting; 2) at some point Tom illustrates the concept of drafting for Nicole, using sugarpackets as cars and her thigh as the track; 3) Tom illustrates it incorrectly, I just can’t remember what was incorrect about it, because I haven’t watched it in years.

6

That last post was re: Days of Thunder, of course, as I failed to note.

7

I don’t like too much being given away in movie trailers either. The most notable culprit, in my opinion, was Double Jeopardy (which really sucked anyway, but I digress…). The movie trailer gave away the whole plot. There is just a slim chance that I might have been surprised to see that her husband was still alive, if I hadn’t seen her discovery of that fact in the trailers.

Apparently the director of that film had a small fit over the trailers. He thought it gave the whole movie away, but there was nothing he could do about it.

8

You know, I was about to say that they had given away too much of the plot for The Phantom Menace, but the I realized, “What plot?”

So, I’ll just say that they gave away too much of the special effects for TPM.

You know what had a good trailer? X-Men. It showed several of the higher points of the movie, but it didn’t detail how those points related to each other, or even which sequence it went in. And it didn’t give away the BIG parts of the plot (at least, none of the trailers I saw).

So there’s your formula:

  1. Show a handful of climactic moments.

  2. Don’t provide any relation to those moments.

  3. Do not show the clips in chronological order.

  4. DO NOT GIVE AWAY THE POINT OF THE MOVIE.

Imagine how much of a success The Sixth Sense would have been if the trailers all ended with, “Oh, yeah, and he’s dead.”

9

Yesterday I went to see Finding Forrester, which, BTW is a great, if somewhat long, movie. Oh, I hadn’t seen a single advertisement for the movie. Do you hear that, studio execs? You didn’t have a chance to ruin it for me!

Anyway, during the previews, they pulled that crap again! Some movie coming out starring Jennifer Lopez and maybe Matthew McConneghy? Not that I’m spelling it right anyway. But here’s what I learned just from the preview:

Lopez is a calm collected wedding planner.
She meets this guy and falls in love with him.
This guy happens to be the groom of a huge wedding she’s planning.
She wants to be with him anyway.
They get in a fight, she runs away.
He goes chasing after her, realizing he truly loves her.
He catches up to her at a place where they danced on their first date and he most likely professes his love to her.
I learned that all just from the previews. Hey studio execs, you still listening? You blew it. You will not be getting any money from me on this film. I just saw the 2 minute version, I’ll be damned if I waste 2 hours seeing it again.