Movie trailers are, in my humble opinion, the best part of going to the movies. I have always loved getting to the theater early, especially when I was younger, so that I could find the best seat, get comfortable and watch the up coming movie previews. Of course, when I was younger, the movie previews were things like Tron, Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi, All of the Indiana Jones movies, Jurassic Park, both Terminator movies, the Rambo and Rocky movies and others like Runaway (if you can remember that one), the Explorers, any James Bond film. There weren't many "independent" movie trailers like AC/DC's Let There Be Rock or The Rocky Horror Picture Show or any independent animation studio other than Disney at the time. The trailers were fun, they didn't give much away and were generally just cheesy. That is until the 90's hit and the studios realized that the more movies they could put out, the more money they could make (in theory) and we got drowned in a sea of shitty movies like My Mother The Car, Car 54, Where Are You? any MtV movie and anything with Dolph Lundgren in it.
The 90's brought us tons of movies like I said and that meant tons of trailers. The problem is, the picture industry also decided at this point to let us know how great these movies were by basically giving us the whole movie condensed into a 3 minute montage. Some studios decided that they weren't going to go that direction with their big budget movies (Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Titanic, even Star Wars: The Phantom Menace) because the directors attached to these bigger pics had control over what the trailers showed. It's a teaser, it's supposed to tease and entice people into going to see the movie (see what I did there?).
But it doesn't tease and entice. It tells us the whole movie and the movie is garbage anyways. This is a multi billion dollar business and they continue to make and remake and reboot and redo movies. Michael Bay is responsible for at least 4 remakes 2 of them the Texas Chainsaw Massacre - what kind of crap is this? Every week there is news of a new movie coming out and the chances of that movie being a reboot has to be like 93.532 percent or so it seems. There are multiple TV commercials for Iron Man (comes out Friday) including 4 trailers and the "special" Super Bowl (TM) segment and they've pretty much given the whole film away. They just can't help themselves. On the other side of the fence, there's the Star Trek movie trailers and they haven't given away shit and makes me want to go see the movie even more than Iron Man.
The more information we're given from the movie trailers, the less faith the picture companies have in said movie - with few exceptions. It's also getting old. If you don't have faith in the movie, then don't greenlight it in the first place. It's not going to be good and it's not going to do anything but cost 50million to make. It's time for a little change in the studio "system" as it is and I normally like to rant about that. For the time being I'm just on about movie trailers. The easiest way to fix this issue is 1 thing. Learn from the past, watch the great movies from the distant and near past and see what made them great. The secret is -it's a compelling story. That's all it is.
Now - go make compelling stories and maybe I'll be less of an asshat when reviewing it... maybe.
