What do we want? TRAILERS! When do we want them? YESTERDAY!
The long-awaited Avengers 4 trailer finally hit Friday morning, revealing the movie’s title to be Avengers: Endgame and spawning endless analysis and predictions. And boy, were Marvel fans ready — they’ve been awaiting this trailer for months. Possibly since credits rolled on Avengers: Infinity War back in April.
In the days and weeks before the trailer dropped, dozens of people on Twitter changed their handles to some version of “GIVE TRAILER UNTITLED AVENGERS.” Fans using the Twitter hashtag #MARVELVSTHEFANS made multiple videos begging the Avengers 4 directors for the trailer. Fans on Reddit shared, then deleted, moment-by-moment descriptions of what supposedly happens in the trailer, based on unofficial leaks. They pored over the social media accounts of the film’s directors and stars, looking for clues to a trailer release date and a title.
More than one rumored date came and went, and we started to think the trailer would never come .
Hype for a movie is one thing. But hype for a trailer? This is where we are now — and it all began more than a hundred years ago…
The first-ever trailer was shown in a New York Loews cinema way back in 1913, and it wasn’t even for a movie. Instead, it was a short film made to advertise the Broadway musical The Pleasure Seekers. But it was a brilliant hook: Tease entertainment seekers with a preview of another piece of entertainment they might enjoy. Naturally, the promotional films took off.
Trailer hysteria isn’t new, but it’s certainly reached new heights, thanks to YouTube and social media, as well as the continued boom of sci-fi and superhero flicks. Studios have even managed to squeeze a little more publicity out of their trailers by offering super-short versions, often called teaser trailers.
Anton Volkov saw trailer love growing back in 2016, when he started a movie-news Twitter account and website he called Trailer Track. A wry quote from writer-director James Mangold that’s pinned to the top of the site’s Twitter account sums up the current trailer infatuation: “[Trailers] tend to debut a few weeks after you’ve reached a peak of frustration,” it reads. “Marketing’s like foreplay.”
“This sort of level of anticipation for marketing materials, be it trailers or posters, was always there,” Volkov says. “It’s just becoming … more mainstream.”
William Bibbiani is a film critic and co-host of Canceled Too Soon, a podcast about short-lived TV shows, and the movie podcast Critically Acclaimed. He agrees trailer madness goes back — at least decades.
“Audiences were so excited for Tim Burton’s original Batman [in 1989] that many people bought tickets to another movie, just to see the trailer in a theater, and then left before the actual film began,” he said.
The trailer for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace created similar buzz 20 years ago. CNET film critic Richard Trenholm calls that era, with no Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, a “veritable Stone Age” as far as viewing trailers. He notes that Steve Jobs himself described the second Phantom Menace trailer as “the biggest internet download event in history.”
Three major developments in the 2000s ratcheted up the hype, Bibbiani says.
High-speed internet connections allow fans to consume trailers and marketing materials instantly and share their reactions just as quickly.
