When The Trailer Is Better Than The Movie

I recently watched Jarhead for the first time since I've been on a bit of a war movie kick lately. Not that I need to explain myself. But America is at war (at the time of typing this), so, zeitgeist, baby! Anyway, the movie is a solid and, from what I gather, realistic psychological portrayal of what it’s like to be an enlisted Marine. It explores the less glorious aspects of the job: tedium, hazing, cuckold anxiety, and the impossible task of waiting to be told what to do while maintaining constant alertness. But besides current events, what made me decide to watch this movie was my memory of its trailer. For whatever reason, I did not see this movie when it came out, but I did think the trailer was cool. It positions the movie as an intense, action/drama-filled war story in the tradition of Apocalypse Now, Platoon, or Full Metal Jacket. Now that I have been making similar content as my job for over a decade - for TV instead of film - I see the art of making trailers in a different light.

The trailer plays out more traditionally in the first half, and then “Jesus Walks” from a pre-mental breakdown Kanye starts playing against footage of oil wells burning and A10 Warthogs laying waste to Iraqi defenses. It’s all charismatically punctuated with an “oorah” from Jamie Foxx. That was pretty awesome in 2005. Apparently the director liked the trailer so much that he put Kanye’s track over the end credits. The movie we got certainly has that but those moments represent a small portion of it. In fact, the whole point of this work by Sam Mendes is that these soldiers spend so much time preparing for action they’ll never see. What does it do to a person to train for months or years to be a killer and then never get the opportunity to do that? That is an interesting question that the movie explores well, but the trailer sold something else.

Unfortunately for the movie, the trailer didn’t lead to huge box office success. Also, despite its positioning and casting as an awards contender, it didn’t get nominated for anything. But this is only a more obscure example of a common truth when it comes to movies: the trailer is often better than the movie itself. I think it’s important to parse out what we mean when we say that, which is that the experience of watching the trailer was better than watching the movie. I don’t think anyone is saying that the trailer is made more skillfully or is of better quality. Those subjective positions could be true, but they aren’t the focus. When we accuse a movie of not being as good as its trailer, we are really saying that the movie did not live up to the hype. The trailer is a promise, and the movie determines whether that promise is kept.

A simple google search will yield plenty of well-known, recent examples for this. Many of them are tied to franchises; either a long awaited sequel or generational reboot. Those movies face an abnormal amount of anticipation and it is an uphill battle for any of them to live up that kind of hype. In the pre-youtube era people would buy tickets to movies they had no interest in seeing just because it had a trailer they wanted to see playing in front of it. This has to be the only reason Meet Joe Black, which had The Phantom Menace trailer playing before it, made any money.

I’m more interested in trailers like the one for Jarhead - one that garnered serious interest on its own merit and not because of the movie’s association with a franchise. Yes, Jarhead is based on a book so there was some built in anticipation with it being connected to existing IP, but it would be difficult to find an example in modern Hollywood that isn’t based on a book, comic book, or is a continuation of a story from another movie. So for now, I am setting aside the movies and trailers where there is a confounding amount of extrinsic pop culture hype. I will come back to them. But even without gigantic expectations, some movies fail to live up to the interest generated by a good trailer.

Exhibit A:

LONGLEGS - The trailer promised this generation’s version of Silence of the Lambs, as well as the most unhinged performance from Nicolas Cage yet. What we got wasn’t bad, but certainly isn’t as good as it was hyped up to be. It is dread-inducing in the first half. The movie conjures a creepy atmosphere, but as it gets into the second half and more plot details are revealed, it’s clear that it is running more on vibes than substance. Also, Cage is barely in it.

What about when a trailer lies? There’s tremendous pressure to deliver a big opening weekend. That leads to a temptation on the part of the trailer makers to do whatever they can to make the final product more attractive, and that includes stretching the truth past its breaking point. Lying and advertising are old bedfellows. We’ve all watched Mad Men right? However, there is a difference between the artful exaggeration of a sales pitch and an outright scam. Some trailers are guilty of so completely mischaracterising a movie, viewers wonder whether the people who made the trailer even saw the movie. That might actually be the case sometimes, but I think what viewers are sensing is that trailers are often made by a different team from the one that made the movie. They aren’t personally connected to it and therefore aren’t as precious about preserving its thesis or look. To that end, they’ll spend extra money to make the special effects shots look even better than what is seen in the movie. It’s more cost effective to make a few shots in a trailer look dazzling than it is to apply the same high standard to thousands of shots across multiple special effects sequences in the final movie. 

Exhibit B:

I don’t envy the team that made the trailer for Downsizing. The movie itself is so tonally inconsistent it feels like three different movies in one. Trailers don’t have enough time for nuance - they need to go with one feeling. They went with comedy. The movie, even though it has big named comedic talent and a ridiculous premise, is something other than that. It explores a lot of complicated ideas and that probably caught people off guard.

From this trailer, Battle Los Angeles looked like it was going to be Black Hawk Down meets District 9. The tone felt grounded, which for the concept I’d say is an achievement. People felt like they were going to get a realistic look at how a modern military would respond to an alien invasion. Instead it felt more like a mid tier video game packed with military movie cliches and faceless aliens of uninspired design. Also most of the marquee, large scale effects shots are in the trailer.

Ever since trailers became available online - specifically on youtube - a whole village of cottage industries was born. There are trailer reactions where people can watch other people watch trailers and react emotionally. There’s trailer criticism where pieces of creative are dissected frame by frame in search of plot details. There are fake trailers for movies that have only been announced, or even some unannounced and completely hypothetical. AI has really run with this last category. It used to be easy to spot a fake trailer, but it has gotten harder recently. All of this means that trailers get far more scrutiny now than they ever did. They can be watched over and over, and if they’re good, they can provide a reliable dopamine hit in two minutes or less. Since they’re released months ahead of a movie’s premiere, we have a chance to really sit and analyze them. How can a movie compete with the experience of watching a summary of its best parts, set to some cool new version of a well known song? And when the movie finally comes, it is immediately judged against the feeling the trailer gave us, even though it has a much lower bar to clear.

In many cases, the odds are stacked against the movie. The trailer has an easier path to success and doesn’t take the blame when the movie doesn’t live up to it. That’s not always the case though. I said I would come back to franchise movies, so allow me to present:

Exhibit C:

Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame - both of these movies had to surmount astronomical expectations even before the trailers were made available. The trailers do a great job of hyping the characters and overall story of the franchise, while being cryptic at best about the specific plot. That’s actually a bit of a luxury - to be able to work from a place where the audience is already familiar with the main aspects. But that didn’t stop people from examining every frame for hints about the plots of these movies. The Infinity War trailer is actually guilty of using a shot that isn’t in the movie (it’s even used as the thumbnail!). But even with all that intense scrutiny and expectation, the movies were a smash commercially and critically.

Expectation and reality rarely align so well. As someone who makes trailers for TV shows and also watches a lot of movies, it would be great if that was always the case. In my line of work, the stakes are a little lower but the same issues and concerns apply. Our team aims to build hype for a product by almost any means necessary. I say almost because we do try to make sure we tell the truth, at least subjectively. We think our product is the best, and that’s what we’re telling you. You might feel differently, but you need to show up and watch to know for sure. The key is convincing you that it’s worth your time to do that. At the end of the day, we all hope that the final product is better than the marketing, but what we want is for you to show up and watch it the night it premieres (or watch a recording of it within three days).