The Art of Teaser Trailers

Unless you have been living under a rock for the fortnight or so (or have no interest in the genre), you may have noticed that the first teaser for The Avengers: Age of Ultron has been released. As well as setting off a whirlwind of fan response and a more than considerable amount of excitement, it should be mentioned that it was a master-class in how to create a teaser trailer, or indeed any trailer.

Teasers are hard to pull off well: they either give away too little or far, far too much. When you get past the initial fan-boy excitement and focus on its content and structure, Ultron joins a select few other recent films in offering a template of how to get people truly excited.

Revealing just enough to entice…

While it may be an obvious point, the objective of a film trailer is to tease you into parting with your money to watch the feature film it is advertising. Sounds simple enough, but you would be surprised just how many films fail at this first hurdle. Broadly speaking, you can divide unsuccessful film teasers into two categories.

On the one hand, there are those that overplay their hand and give away far too much about overall film. This can range from divulging most (if not all) of the film’s plot to spoiling a key revelation from the film’s plot. Two excellent examples of this from recent history are Terminator Salvation (which reveals one of the key characters to be a machine) and The Two Towers, which revealed to those who hadn’t read the books that Gandalf had in fact survived his fall with the Balrog during The Fellowship of the Ring. By revealing too much, these films not only spoil key elements of the film for the paying audience but actually run the risk of reducing their appeal – if you’ve seen most of the plot already, why bother paying to see the finished film at the cinema?

At the other end of the scale, there are those films who tease far too little. Occasionally, the minimalist approach can work brilliantly as it leaves a potential audience desperate for more details (see the near-perfect initial teaser for Man of Steel for proof of this success) but more often they are more confused and unattractive than interesting.

While by no means a concrete rule, this type of flaw tends to be seen more in the trailers for more artistically-minded films that want to aim to intellectual sensibilities than the popcorn masses. A fine recent case of this was the trailer for Terence Malick’s To the Wonder, which is awash with meaningful glances, meandering shots of fields and snippets from reviews, all surrounded by worthy narration. Far from being appealing, it comes across as an art installation too keen to impose upon you its significance and, more importantly, not in any way interest you into watching the finished film.

Must… See… Age of Ultron…

With this background in mind, we can turn to Age of Ultron. When you watch it again, it manages the neat trick of straddling the middle ground between these two groups while featuring the successful elements of both.

Firstly, it does tease what appear to be some key elements from the film’s storyline. From the Hulk battling a vast Iron Man suit to the brief sight of Captain America’s shield broken in twain, it lets people know that there are some profound elements to this film that will significantly alter the course of the ever-expanding Marvel universe. However, it balances this with a degree of tight-lipped secrecy in that there is still doubt as to how and why these key events occur and, more crucially, the extent to which they are important. Who was in the Iron Man suit? Is it just the shield that was destroyed? We don’t know yet, but my word do we want to. Mix this with the fantastic use of ‘I Have no Strings’ to add a creeping, ominous tone to proceedings and you have a quite brilliant piece of movie teaser trailing.

As the title of this article may have suggested, teasers are not an exact science – they are a combination of techniques that work if mixed just right but can fail miserably if done even slightly wrong. It is an art form: inconsistent, complex and often frustrating but splendid when done right. How it is done is often a mystery, but, like when Ultron was teased, you know a good piece of trailer art when you see it. Safe to say, there are millions who know cannot wait for May 2015…

Over to you!

What did you think of the Age of Ultron trailer? What are the best/worst trailers that you have ever seen?

Comment below or tweet @FilmInquiry @ChrisDWorrall with your suggestions – we’d love to hear them!