Comming This Fall: Spoilers!

Movie trailers are kind of a hard thing to do right. You need to show just enough to convince the viewer that they want to see more, but not so much as to ruin the premise of the movie. This is fucking hard to do, but it would be way easier if the film industry had any faith in the viewing audience. Unfortunately, they don't. This is why sequels and remakes get made and new ideas are shunned like modern day lepers.

This is a spoiler heavy post. You have been warned.

Movie trailers are all set up to make you want to watch a movie, but if the main reason the movie is going to be a significant plot twist, that needs to be left out of the trailer. Not gently alluded to. Not casually referenced. Left the fuck out. The Cabin In The Woods trailer gives away the main idea behind what makes the movie unique, and easily could have been sold as a standard teen slasher instead. I was told prior to seeing the movie to not watch the trailers or read anything about the movie because what makes it a great movie is a meta-narrative plot twist that comes completely out of left field. Its a great movie that fucks with the horror paradigm in a very original way, and the trailer gives away the twist like 30 seconds in.

If I had seen the trailer prior to watching the movie I would have been pissed. Your opening weekend might take a hit because the movie looks cliche, but overall you would produce a better viewing experience for your audience, and as such, you might still get decent numbers overall as people who see it will flock to tell other people to watch it due to how great a film it is. In the same vein as ruining the twist in the main plot; sometimes trailers just straight up ruin the movie's ending (al la Quarantine). The impact that the ending of a movie is supposed to have is greatly reduced if you know it going in. Its why prequels to movies don't have much in the way of tension when it comes to worrying about characters dying. If a character from the original film is in the prequel you know they come out of the movie unscathed, don't fucking waste that scene trying to manufacture false tension.

Trailers sometimes also make you think the movie is completely different from what it actually is. The trailer for Sweeney Todd looks like a slasher film instead of a musical, which probably made a lot of people angry (I knew it was a musical going in as I had seen a stage show of it prior to seeing it so I was not put off, also, a good musical is bad ass). Observe and Report is another movie that does this as it makes itself look like Paul Blart: Mall Cop rather than what it is: a dark comedy complete with a date rape scene and copious amounts of violence and drugs.

This comes down to one of the problems that prevail in the movie industry. No one trusts audiences to watch anything anymore, so they have to make a movie seem appealing by jamming all the best stuff into the trailers. This is why twists get revealed, because they want people to see them as unique. The only real solution here is to stop letting idiot marketing departments cobble together movie trailers without any apparent oversight. I don't think anyone was pleased with Cabin in the Woods' carefully crafted twist being called out at the first fucking opportunity and shitting all over the first act. Let's try for some subtlety in our previews, maybe then it'll be worth going to see a movie again.