Obvious Revelation #1: Movie Trailers are Just Advertisements

So, last week I was saving up minutes of creative time in order to spend them on consuming "The Last Jedi" in theaters. In the process I realized that I was not only going to need to budget for the running time of "The Last Jedi" (a healthy 152 minutes), I was also going to have to budget about 20 minutes for previews and the occasional advertisement.

And that's when I realized something really obvious - movie trailers are advertisements. Movie trailers are designed to get you to go out and pay money for a product - a movie. This is very obvious, right? But I have always loved movies so much, that this capitalist aspect of the movie trailer has been invisible to me. It has felt like a privilege to watch movie trailers, or at least it was something which I took for granted as part of a proper movie-going experience.

Trailers became even more special to me when I lived in Korea, because there, instead of 20 minutes of trailers, and maybe a few ads, you would get 20 minutes of advertisements* and then 1-3 trailers, if you were lucky. So when I first got back to America trailers seemed like a real treat again, though I'm still annoyed by the advertisements, since when I grew up in the 80s and 90s it was still 100% wall-to-wall movie trailers.

Anyway, this colored my experience of the trailers this time around, I think.** Though I was practically in ecstasy watching the trailer for "The Avengers: Infinity War", every other trailer was at best a passing curiosity for me. I guess maybe if they'd shown "Black Panther" I might have been interested. But mainly I didn't want to see trailers for movies I hadn't heard of, least of all some crappy trailers for crappy animated movies about gnomes.***



All of a sudden I'm just done with having my attention hijacked. If I'm not choosing the trailers I want to see, if I can't fast-forward through them or mute them, I would rather not be held hostage in a darkened theater and made to watch them. Sigh. I feel sort of jaded saying that, and I do wonder, in part, if they just made better trailers (or better movies) in the 80s and 90s.

Anyway, trailers are advertisements, I thought you should know. And I think I'm done watching them, at least the ones I haven't chosen to watch myself. I'll have to think of some type of method for not watching trailers when I go to the theater. Maybe I can bring earphones and something to draw with. I'm not using up any more precious consumption minutes on movie trailers unless it's to watch Bearded Captain America unite with his fellow Avengers or something of equal or greater value.


*Usually for smartphones, soju and maybe a car. Sometimes you'd also get an ad featuring an unfortunate radish who would often have a credit card run up his backside.


**Either that or the majority of mainstream films are just shittier than they used to be, or their trailers at least are shittier. I really hope the people who made "Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom" movie just have no idea how to make a compelling trailer.

***"Gnomeo and Juliet 2"? There was a 1? This reminds me of the time in 1996 when Aaron Dobbs and some of the other people at the Carmike Geneva 4 Theater and I made up a bunch of improbable fake movie titles (Three's Company The Movie, Lassie 2: Hellbound, Garfield:The Movie, etc.) and actually put them up on the marquee for a day to see if anyone would notice. [End result - mainly our boss noticed.] Of course "Garfield" later actually became a movie, thus beginning the long descent into mediocrity that is the American film industry.

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