![]() Your eyes are given time to adjust to the screen, and the lighting and stragglers have some extra time to get their concessions and get to their seats. There is something fun about seeing a trailer for an anticipated movie on the big screen surrounded by an engaged and excited crowd, and turning to the person next to you to deliver the standard "That looks good" or "I want to see that."Īlthough not their explicit goal, trailers also allow you some time to get settled and in the mood to watch the movie. It felt like we were getting something extra, an unexpected and pleasant surprise.Īnd just as the theatrical experience of watching a film cannot be replicated at home, the same goes for trailers. Anecdotally, I remember as a kid being totally stoked when a movie had more than three trailers. If you’re at the movies, there’s a good chance that you’re a movie fan and likely want to see some trailers before the feature. People like movie trailers, as evidenced by the millions upon millions of views many of them get on YouTube. Dropping down to a 90-minute movie, that percentage rises to 18%, making a fifth of your moviegoing experience advertisements. And consider this: with 20 minutes of previews on a three-hour movie, 10% of your experience is not the movie itself, but the trailers. Long runtimes might not stop people from going to the movies if Endgame and IT’s box office are any indication, but on films long and short, it probably does detract from the experience a bit when you’re forced to sit through a half-hour comedy’s worth of trailers. When you tack on 20+ minutes of previews to a movie that’s already nearing or past the three-hour mark, it becomes quite a big ask. Those runtimes alone can be challenging when it comes to audience patience, the bathroom break issue and the overall time commitment people have to make to go see a movie. ![]() Just this year, movies like Avengers: Endgame, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, IT Chapter Two and the upcoming The Irishman (which will have a limited theatrical release) have bladder-busting runtimes attached to them. Perhaps in an effort to compete with streaming alternatives by giving consumers more runtime for their buck, movies are getting longer. The other big factor likely reducing the tolerance of a lot of trailers is runtime, and this is where a ton of trailers really starts to get annoying. However, if theater-only trailers are to become a thing, they are merely in their embryonic stage at this juncture. It makes you sit up and take notice when a trailer neither you, nor anyone else in the audience, has ever seen before begins to play. The recent trend of theater-only trailers is an interesting concept that could counter that kind of fatigue. We aren’t being shown something for the first time or having a new experience, we’re just being shown something we’ve already seen before and therefore we aren’t as engaged. Because of that, trailers don’t have quite the novelty and effect they once did. This is almost certainly truer for movie fans, but even general audiences have access to YouTube and social media, where the latest trailers are shared around for all to see. This is just conjecture, but I think that part of the reason that people tend to favor fewer trailers is because there’s a not-insignificant chance that you’ve already seen the trailers before you walk into the theater. For one thing, nowadays, you don’t have to go to the movies to watch the latest movie trailers you can watch them at home on a TV, computer monitor or a six-inch phone screen often before they even show up in theaters. Therefore, although opinions will vary greatly based on personal preference, it seems that movie theaters do have something of a ‘trailers’ problem. In my view, anything that detracts from the theatrical experience needs to be seriously looked at. ![]() Yet for all their positive attributes, a lot of factors, both internal and external, have rendered the sheer amount of trailers attached to modern movies into more of a burden than a blessing. ![]() Movie trailers have been a part of moviegoing for nearly as long as movies have been around, and they are great in a lot of ways. ![]() They were first introduced all the way back in 1913 and began morphing into their modern form in the '60s and '70s. It is undeniable that trailers are a huge part of the moviegoing experience. This is only one poll, and more data on the subject is certainly warranted, but this disparity between moviegoers' ideal amount of in-theater trailers and the actual amount shown in most of the big chains (where most people are seeing movies) suggests that there is indeed a trailer problem. ![]()
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