The Internet Has Forever Ruined Super Bowl Movie Trailers
Once upon a time, back in ye olden tymes, I used to get really excited about Super Bowl movie trailers.
You may know the situation. You're a movie kid, not a sports kid, but the Super Bowl is still a major event for you. With the biggest audience of the year glued to the TV screen, advertisers are paying big bucks to sell what they have to sell. And that includes movie studios and their most lavish wares: their expensive blockbusters. Sitting down to wait for those trailers was one heck of an experience. You, along with the rest of the world, were going to see the first snippets of the biggest movies of the year. And because of those astronomical costs, and those extremely limited ad windows, everyone had to bring their A-game. If a movie trailer flopped at the Super Bowl, it flopped in front of a bajillion people. It had to wow you. It had to put its best foot forward and then some. It had to advance the argument that movie trailers aren't just marketing, but their own kind of art form that truly showcases the power of film editing. Good or bad, Super Bowl movie trailers were a freaking event. They had to throw down the gauntlet.
But not anymore. Times change. How we watch and read and listen has changed. The way people learn about movies (often in waves, from the dedicated nerds years in advance to the super-casuals the year of release) has changed alongside all of that. Yes, thank the internet. And yes, we can partially blame the internet for why Super Bowl movie trailers, while undying and inevitable, no longer feel like proper events carefully crafted to excite and entice countless millions of people.
Do you remember when Super Bowl trailers were good and fun?
Yes, there's a smidge of stupid millennial nostalgia to this. I know. I'm aware. I'm annoyed about this one day a year, so forgive me. I'll be a normal functioning adult again tomorrow. But just watch this year's batch of Super Bowl movie trailers. Go ahead. /Film wrote up a whole bunch of them. Note what they have in common: lackluster editing, a lack of dramatic panache, and, most tellingly, instructions that the viewer should go online right now to watch the "full" trailer.
That's what Super Bowl movie trailers are now. They're ... ads! And yes, movie trailers themselves are also ads, but at least they're ads that can pretend to be something more, something more artistic and useful. But these "Big Game" spots are literally advertisements for the advertisements, and play as such. Rather than feel like carefully crafted events, these spots are now chaotically whittled versions of the full trailer that has been simultaneously released online. These movies are now treating the internet as the proper battlefield, and just letting folks watching the game know what's up.
But what if the folks watching the game don't really care to go online and watch the full trailer? What if they see the odd, haphazard "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes" trailer during the game and miss the jaw-dropping actual trailer available on YouTube? Wouldn't that be a shame? And doesn't it hurt the movie when folks who could've had such a strong first impression made on them hand-wave it away because what they just saw didn't encourage them to look for more?
I'm not mad that we can now instantly and easily watch movie trailers on the internet. But yeah, it may be silly, but I am bummed that the art of the Super Bowl movie trailer is now a relic of 20 years ago, and there's no logical reason for it to ever make a comeback.
I spoke about this topic (and more) on today's episode of the /Film Daily Podcast:
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