Pixar (well, everybody) needs to re-learn how to make trailers

[Mike Blakesley]

We're running the new trailer for "Inside Out 2" right now. The first teaser was really intriguing and made me really want to see the movie. The new (presumably "final") trailer that came in this week shows way too much -- it's just punchline after punchline. I still have high hopes for the movie, but this trailer somehow makes it look a little "less good" than the first one did. I'm curious if it had that same effect on others.

I remember the grand old days of the original Pixar, when they were confident enough in their movies to just give very small, vague bits of info about the movie in the trailers.

I'm going to swap the original teaser trailer back in for this movie.

The other one that's mildly irritating is the one for "Twisters," because the original "Twister" trailer was one of the best trailers ever -- lots of it was just black screen with just occasional bits of action. The sound and your imagination did the trick. The new one is just a standard action-movie clipfest.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Just like everything else in Hollywood, those making the trailers have lost their mojo... It seems like they want to show us how expensive their movie was to make, so they make sure we see each and every action sequence. Meanwhile, they don't seem to care that we've essentially seen the movie in the trailer already.

I'm pretty sure it's not the first time I posted it here. I still consider the first War of the Worlds (2005) trailer to be one of the best trailers made in the last two decades. It's an example of a bait-and-switch, as I liked the trailer better than the subsequent movie.

B.t.w., there will be a new "Twister" movie released somewhere this summer. I guess the trailer is somewhat of a mixed bag. The best part is the first comment below the video:

If the MPA rating description isn't "intense depiction of very bad weather," we riot.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Marcel... I don't quite agree they lost their mojo. The people that knew how to make trailers we like have likely retired or passed away. And now you have a whole new generation of people with different views, and that grew up under completely different circumstances than our generation did. Now they are making both the movies and the trailers that go with them. Plus today, Pixar is really nothing but a name, like Disney itself. The mojo at Disney today in general is the same as it is at Boeing and almost all other corporations out there. Get it made as cheaply as you can so we can make the most profit.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I guess we need independent market research to work towards tie-break here.

The problem I see with current trailers is that they don't entice me to go see a movie. Most of the trailers show far too much of the story of the movie. I can't even imagine those trailers really appeal to the current generation, that generation with an average attention span of goldfish after it has been deep fried and hung out to dry.

Let's go about 25 years back in time. Maybe that's already a pretty long time, but to me it still somehow feels like yesterday. Imagine the trailer for "The Matrix" revealing "what the matrix is" in the trailer. What if the Sixth Sense would reveal the plot twist at the end of the movie, right there in the trailer? Or what if Fight Club would do its big reveal right there in the trailer?

By the way, did you know that ALL those movies were released in 1999? Wouldn't you want to jump right into that time machine back to that year? You know, the year the world was going to end? Maybe we should first visit Rekall though, to get our memories wiped clear, just to live through it again, like it's the first time...

Regarding Disney v.s. Pixar: While both may lately be primarily outputting heaps of crap, they still are two separate studios. They use different workflows, different teams, even different software stacks (Presto v.s. AutoDesk Maya) for example... Then again, both Airbus and Boeing buy (parts of their) fuselages from Spirit AeroSystem, once a division of... Boeing...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

No argument on them showing too much of the story. But after sitting through a half hour of commercials at the local AMC a few weeks ago, there wasn't a single movie in the batch that I wanted to go see. If these previews are aimed at the younger generation of today, then we are all in real trouble... Pixar may be a separately located studio, but they are still owned by Disney and controlled by Disney.

[Mike Blakesley]

Pixar started its decline right after they were bought by Disney. They still had some good stuff in the pipeline. Once that was depleted, it was time for sequels and half-ass stories.

Although it must be said, the only two Pixar movies that appear in our all-time top 15 are both post-Disney-acquisition sequels: "Incredibles 2" and "Finding Dory." Two thirds of our all time top 15 (by attendance) are sequels, including #1, which is "Top Gun: Maverick."

[Marcel Birgelen]

I'd consider Wall-E and Ratatouille to be in my Pixar Top 5, both movies were made after the Disney acquisition, although like Mike indicated, they had most of the stories and concepts already worked out for them. I actually liked the original Cars, released back in 2006, despite all the criticism it got at the time. You could feel the passion John Lasseter had put behind this project. This film was released under the Disney/Pixar label but would have been the first movie not to be released under Disney's supervision. It only became a Disney property, because Roy E. Disney managed to "save the day" by fixing the beef between Steve Jobs and the Disney management (primarily by ousting Michael Eisner).

It's striking how often a single person can make a big difference in such behemoth of organizations like Disney/Pixar. I still consider Lasseter to be the primary source of Pixar magic. The moment he started focussing on other stuff than Pixar, I consider the moment the stuff slowly went drown the drain. I guess the latter absence of Steve Jobs in the daily operations of Pixar may also be a factor. While Steve Jobs has by many people been described as a terrible person to work with, he wasn't afraid to ditch entire projects with millions of investments in them if he didn't like the end result.

[Bobby Henderson]

I used to like movie trailers. But now they're just derivative and annoying. Aside from spoiling much of the movie these trailers are all made with the same style templates associated with a given genre. Every horror movie trailer has the sound sounds and hyper edits. The Twisters trailer didn't have anything unique in it.

To be fair, back in the 1990's CGI was still a new thing. So a teaser trailer, such as the original teaser for Twister could show imagery we had never seen before. The trailer showed very little, but was dramatically loud (especially if heard in 5.1 digital). At the end there was this very dramatic POV shot from inside a vehicle. A pickup truck is falling out of the sky and one of its tires comes flying thru the windshield. It's funny they didn't use that shot in the movie. A particular character would have been killed.

The trailer makers are going thru the motions though. I think one problem is they're having to craft trailers for many global markets at once. So they just hammer out a clip art version rather than spend any time coming up with an interesting concept.

One of my favorite teaser trailers was the one for Total Recall. Very simple concept. It shows nothing of the actual movie. The 70mm version had a pretty good fly-by surround effect with the two "moons" shooting past the camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5HKzf5OWWc


Out of new trailers, I do kind of like the one for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The title card at the end where the "FURIOSA" letters rotate into view in front of Anya Taylor-Joy looks epic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJMuhwVlca4

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I used to like movie trailers. But now they're just derivative and annoying. Aside from spoiling much of the movie these trailers are all made with the same style templates associated with a given genre.

Same with a lot of today's TV shows too. Same Template for a given series, just different bad guys, incident, or fire. Same people same place, just the other corner across the street, same police station, fire station, courthouse, etc. Same scripts with just the names changes to them. This is why I rarely if ever watch TV any more.

[Mike Blakesley]

Another one I liked was a teaser for "Oh God!" in 1977. It had no picture at all, just "God's voice" (as rendered by George Burns) and it had NO content from the movie at all. "Hi, it's me, God. Yeah, God. Big G. I'm here to tell you about my movie. It's pretty good. Trust me...like it says on the money."

There was also a version that had clouds floating by while the voice was talking, but the one we had was just a blank screen.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I had the one with the clouds on one of MT trailer reels back in the 1980's.