About a year and a half ago, I was sitting in a movie theater waiting for a movie to start. The previews began and a trailer for the upcoming movie “”Cast Away”” began showing.
The trailer showed Tom Hanks marooned on a desert island after a crash and a few clips of him on the island as he became more grizzly and savage with each scene. And then they did it — they ruined the movie. How so? By showing another scene, in which you see him reunited with his wife.
How this ruined the movie is simple: You know that he gets off the island! By viewing the trailer for the movie, all the suspense was gone since you literally knew how the movie would end.
Unfortunately, the trailers like the one for “”Cast Away”” have become the rule, rather than the exception. Previews are getting longer and longer, revealing more dramatic content of movies.
Sometimes ,it gets to the point where the previews will show you every humorous scene a comedy has. Sometimes with thrillers, they will detail every nuance of the plot.
Who really wants to know so much about a movie before one goes to see it?
A thriller is not very exciting if you know what will happen before it happens. A comedy is not very funny when you already know all the jokes.
It’s hard to laugh at Ben Stiller’s ignorance at the meaning of the word “”bulimic”” in “”Zoolander”” when you’ve already seen the scene 10 times in the previews.
At times, I get funny looks when I start humming to myself so that I can’t hear the actors’ dialogue on the screen.
Am I the only one who deliberately talks to my friends during the previews so that I will not absorb any information? Or shows up to movies 15 minutes late on purpose so that I will miss the trailers?
I should not have to resort to these actions, and neither should anyone else who wants to go to a movie and actually see new material.
The solution to this problem is simple: The movie industry should go back to the previews and trailers of old.
Get the director on the screen for a minute and let him talk about the movie. Have him give a brief sketch of the movie’s premise.
Have him talk about what audience he thinks the movie will appeal to. When you do show clips from the movie, make them brief and vague.
In return, get rid of the five minute previews, and the narrator whose theatric voice informs you of each twist the plot unfolds.
The American consumer is not as dumb as the movie industry thinks. We don’t need to be shown every good scene in a movie to realize that we would like to see it. For once, we’d like to be surprised.
