We used to get such wonderful standalone teaser trailers...what happened to them?
Movie marketing never remains stagnant. It’s just as true today as it was decades earlier. Just compare your average movie trailer from the 1940s to one from the 1980s, it’s like they’re from different planets. A great indication of how movie marketing has shifted in the modern world has been the steady decrease in the prominence of standalone teaser trailers. From the 1980s through the 2000s, movies would put together teaser trailers devoid of any footage from the final film. These promotional materials gave away the vibe and atmosphere of a prospective motion picture while keeping everything under wraps.
These impressive variations of normal movie trailers were exciting creations that could function as standalone entities unto themselves, sometimes even outliving the features they were promoting. The 2002 Jerry Seinfeld documentary Comedian, for instance, isn’t something that isn’t talked about regularly decades after its release, but that teaser trailer focusing on a rebellious voice-over narrator will always be humorous. Similarly, a teaser for Toys focused solely on the movie’s leading man, Robin Williams, doing an assortment of comedic antics in a field has become so enduringly popular that it even got parodied in an episode of The Simpsons.
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The aesthetics of Comedian and Toys as finished movies couldn’t be more drastically different. However, they do share great examples of how standalone teasers can give you a taste of what you’re about to watch without spoiling the whole feast. As the two prominent examples might suggest, the standalone teaser was extremely popular with comedies. These productions typically employed performers, like Williams or Billy Crystal, who could come up with entertaining material on the fly, they wouldn’t need a script to be funny. Thus, a standalone teaser could be concocted around their shenanigans and get people’s interests in their upcoming star vehicles without spoiling all the best gags in the final product.
However, comedies didn’t have a monopoly over the standalone teaser. Blockbuster movies used to regularly engage in this style of marketing to drum up hype for much-anticipated titles as much as a year in advance. The likes of Terminator 2: Judgement Day or Spider-Man had especially memorable standalone trailers, one that promised spectacle without spoiling all the best moments of excitement from the features they were promoting. Sometimes, principal photography on these big-budget movies wouldn’t even be finished and yet a standalone teaser trailer could already get the public frothing at the mouth to see more.
Someone else who used standalone teaser trailers to a heavy degree was Pixar Animation Studios. The likes of Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, and Ratatouille especially (though not exclusively among the studio’s works) used this tool to great effect. An amusing conversation between monsters Mike and Sully about whether or not they’re in the right child’s bedroom or Mr. Incredible struggling to put on his utility belt wouldn’t end up in the movies these teasers were promoting. However, they immediately conveyed the relatability of these larger-than-life characters while delivering memorable gags audiences couldn’t get enough of. Given their effectiveness, it’s no wonder Pixar and sister company Walt Disney Animation Studios were using standalone teasers for projects as recently as the 2010 film Toy Story 3 or the 2013 feature Frozen.
Given the ubiquity of standalone teasers, particularly among some of the biggest movies in the business, it would’ve been hard to imagine around 2005 or 2006 that this style of marketing would ever vanish. However, by the time the 2010s began, standalone teasers were largely reserved exclusively for kid’s fare. By 2015, this type of trailer had entirely vanished from the mainstream film scene. Part of this was due to the decrease in big-screen comedies being produced by American movie studios. With fewer and fewer entries in this genre getting made, there were also fewer and fewer opportunities for standalone teasers to get employed.
The biggest culprit, though, is the shorter windows for marketing movies. Standalone teasers were largely (though not exclusively) released a year or so before a movie debuted. Unless you’re a Christopher Nolan directorial effort, the idea of marketing features a year in advance is a nonexistent concept in the modern world. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, many titles, even big blockbusters, would start their marketing campaigns much closer to the release dates of the films they’re promoting. In 2022, studios are wary of advertising features too far in advance lest a new COVID-19 variant show up in the future and thwart theatrical release plans.
Thus, massive blockbusters like Thor: Love and Thunder and Jurassic World: Dominion now only start proper advertising three or four months before they come out. Meanwhile, your average streaming title from Netflix may not drop a trailer until just a few weeks before its release. With so little time for any kind of promotion, movie studios hit the ground running with elaborate trailers. They don’t have time anymore for standalone teasers devoid of footage from the actual film. A compressed schedule has taken the pomp and circumstance out of movie marketing. Unique and imaginative ways of conveying what a motion picture is have been sacrificed at the altar of quicker advertising campaigns.
This issue of a compressed schedule also feeds into a new issue that’s ensured the death of the standalone teaser: competition for people’s eyeballs. It wasn’t like HBO or even video games at home didn’t exist when Toys kicked off its marketing campaign, but there are more options than ever for entertainment for the general public. In the war to grab people’s attention away from TikTok, gaming, the internet, and everything else, movie studio marketers don’t want to “waste” people’s time with promotional materials that don’t even have footage from the movie they’re promoting.
Every piece of marketing counts more than ever and that means studios, to compete with all the options for entertainment, have eschewed standalone teaser trailers in favor of trailers that just immediately get to the point. You’re more likely than ever to see trailers like the ones for Sing 2 that spoil every plot point, but the standalone teaser trailer has gotten drowned out by modern marketing demands. It’s a sad development, especially since standalone teaser trailers could be great tools to get people’s attention in a jam-packed pop culture landscape.
Yet another modern marketing tool that’s emerged in the last decade is a greater emphasis on big “reveals” in trailers to pump up fan excitement, especially on social media. Superhero films especially get much of their marketing muscle from trailers that gradually introduce more and more fan-favorite comic book characters from the movie/TV show they’re trying to promote. It’s an easy way to get the internet buzzing and make your movie an immediate must-see event. However, this reliance on showing off what you will see in a finished product has lessened the need for a standalone teaser trailer.
When your trailer is entirely built on material that won’t be in the finished film, that’s gonna stick out like a sore thumb in an era of trailers tailor-made to get maximum cheers at San Diego Comic-Con panels. The carefully orchestrated marketing campaigns of your average Marvel Cinematic Universe or DC Extended Universe titles don’t have time for these sorts of teasers, and neither do most other kinds of movies these days.
Granted, not every movie requires a standalone teaser and a year-long marketing campaign. Certainly, the standalone teaser for The Da Vinci Code, for example, is on nobody’s list of all-time great movie trailers. But there should still be room for all kinds of forms of movie marketing, to match how varied feature-length films are. Restricting ourselves in terms of what kind of trailers get produced does nobody any favors, particularly genres that could use an extra break. With the substantial decrease in big-screen comedies in the last five years, the return of the standalone teaser trailer could be an immediate and effective way to get eyeballs back on these projects.
Perhaps, though, the demise of the standalone teaser trailer is just inevitable, another byproduct of the ever-shifting winds of movie marketing. Throughout the years, all kinds of facets of movie marketing, from the roadshow release strategy to even movie trailer voice-overs, have whittled away in prominence. The standalone teaser trailer may have just been biding time until that inevitable fate snatched it up like so many other ways of promoting movies. But if Hollywood ever wants to figure out a unique way to convey upcoming movies as must-see events, or even just create great self-contained teasers for the ages, the standalone teaser trailer will always be standing by, ready to return to its former glory.
Douglas Laman is a life-long movie fan, writer and Rotten Tomatoes approved critic whose writing has been published in outlets like The Mary Sue, Fangoria, The Spool, and ScarleTeen. Residing both on the Autism spectrum and in Texas, Doug adores pugs, showtunes, the Wes Anderson movie Fantastic Mr. Fox, and any music by Carly Rae Jepsen.
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