Twenty Minutes of Trailers Later, I've Forgotten What I Came to Watch

I want to walk you through my Tuesday night. I sat down on the couch, fired up a streaming service, and clicked play on a forty-minute episode of a show I'd been saving. Twenty-two minutes later, the episode finally started. Twenty-two minutes. Of trailers, promos, and 'recommended for you' montages. I watched nearly an entire episode of something else before the thing I chose showed up.

And here's the kicker: by minute fifteen, I couldn't remember what I'd clicked on. I had watched so many previews for shows about detectives, chefs, and single women in Brooklyn that my brain had fully migrated. I had to check my own viewing history. That's not marketing. That's a home invasion.

The Trailer Used to Be an Art Form

Let's get nostalgic for a second, because I've earned it. The old teaser trailer was a haiku. Jaws gave you a shark, a swimmer, and a tagline. The Blair Witch Project gave you a legend and told you nothing else. The whole point was seduction without confession. You left the trailer hungrier, not fed.

Somewhere along the way, Hollywood decided that was a bad business model. Now the average trailer for a two-hour movie is a two-and-a-half-minute summary of the two-hour movie, including the third act, the twist, and the emotional climax, set to a song that was cool three years ago.

The Streaming Version Is Somehow Worse

Theaters at least have the excuse of a captive audience. Streaming services have no such excuse, and yet they've turned autoplay previews into a gauntlet. You open the app and a trailer starts loudly, unprompted, like a car alarm. You scroll to escape and two more start. By the time you've found your show, you've seen the entire first season of four other shows, condensed, spoilered, and scored to a cover of a Talking Heads song.

And the 'skip intro' button — the one mercy the industry ever granted us — has quietly disappeared on half these platforms. They gave us a little courtesy door and then bricked it over.

What Trailers Get Wrong Now

Here's my working theory: modern trailers are made by people terrified of being blamed if you don't understand the movie. So they explain. They over-explain. They show the joke, then show it again, then put a caption on it. A comedy trailer that gives away every laugh isn't a trailer — it's a spoiler with a budget.

The worst offenders are the ones that end with the movie's actual emotional climax, the shot that's clearly meant to hit hard at the end of the film, sitting right there in the promo like a cherry on a spoiled sundae. I've sat in theaters knowing exactly how a movie ends before the studio logo faded. That's malpractice.

The Rare Ones Still Doing It Right

Credit where it's due, because some folks still remember the craft. The teaser for Nope — a single ominous cloud, a horse, and Jordan Peele's name — told me nothing and made me desperate. A24 has built an entire brand on trailers that suggest a mood instead of narrating a plot. And every so often a horror trailer comes along that understands the most powerful tool in marketing is the sound of nothing.

That's the secret the old masters knew: the trailer's job is to create a question, not answer one. Curiosity is the product. Everything else is inventory.

How to Fight Back

You're not powerless. Mute the autoplay. Turn off previews in your streaming settings — most platforms bury the option, but it exists. If a trailer starts and you already know you're seeing the movie, look away. I know that sounds dramatic. I'm a dramatic man.

And if you really want to send a message, watch the movies you love without ever seeing their trailers. Go in blind. The first twenty minutes of a film you know nothing about is one of the last honest pleasures left in this business.

The teaser is dead. Long live the mystery. Somebody in Hollywood should write that on a poster and, for once, not explain it in the trailer.