With more media available than anyone could ever consume, the snap judgment now reigns supreme. If it takes you longer than a Snapchat snap to convince someone to pay attention to your movie/game/political campaign, you've already lost countless crucial potential customers. How many of you have already stopped reading this article? For anyone still here, there's a recent trend[1] of movie trailers opening with brief trailers for themselves — and our increasingly short attention spans are to blame.
The newest online trailers for upcoming summer blockbusters like X-Men: Apocalypse, Jason Bourne, Independence Day: Resurgence, and Ice Age: Collision Course all open with a title and a few seconds of flashy movie images desperate to hold onto viewers' precious eyeballs. The images don't even have to make sense. In fact, the more nonsensical the better, so viewers will actually sit through the otherwise unacceptably long two-minute actual trailer to understand what the heck they just saw. It's like a mystery box for thwarting the Skip Ad button on YouTube.
Trailers within trailers are just the latest, most distilled form of an ongoing marketing trend. When ads alone aren't getting the job done, if you're a digital marketing exec (or Xzibit) the only answer is ads for ads, dawg. The Verge described this with the perfectly dystopian word "metahype," and cites Ant-Man's pixel-sized teasers[2] as an example. But the Ouroboros is even longer. Here's a Vine[3] for a trailer for a Wolverine m ovie. Here's a teaser of a Terminator motion poster[4]. Here's an entire movie whose sole purpose is to advertise other, upcoming movies, and among its other countless problems[5], Justice League commercials are literally baked into the plot of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice[6].
Can you blame the studios, though? Yes, but there's more to it than that. The movie business is more hit-driven than ever. Notice that all of the movies mentioned are also part of big, familiar franchises. And if a movie isn't doing everything it can to dominate as much mindshare as possible, it can kiss that billion-dollar box office ring goodbye. The vast and open competition on the internet makes that fight much bloodier. Studios are even pulling out of San Diego Comic-Con[7] as fan hype there isn't translating to fan hype everywhere else as effectively. So, when you queue up a movie trailer in five years and it's just 10 seconds of Kevin Feige screaming "For the lo ve of God, please watch Spider-Man!" over a snippet of the movie, you'll know how we got there.
References
- ^ a recent trend (www.theverge.com)
- ^ pixel-sized teasers (www.youtube.com)
- ^ Vine (vine.co)
- ^ motion poster (www.youtube.com)
- ^ other countless problems (www.geek.com)
- ^ baked into the plot of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (www.geek.com)
- ^ pulling out of San Diego Comic-Con (birthmoviesdeath.com)
