From 1913 silent-era 'coming attractions' to YouTube two-and-a-half-minute teasers. The marketing form that has shaped what audiences expect from cinema.
The film trailer is the marketing form that most-consistently shapes what audiences expect to see when they go to a film. Trailers determine which films audiences seek out, what tonal register they expect, what kind of dramatic experience they have prepared themselves for. Almost every cinematic decision a director makes is, to some extent, made with the eventual trailer-cut in mind.
This essay traces the trailer's history from its early-cinema origins through the contemporary social-media era.
The first known film trailer is generally dated to November 1913, when an exhibitor named Nils Granlund cut a series of clips from the upcoming musical comedy The Pleasure Seekers and showed them at the Marcus Loew theatre in New York. The clips were called 'coming attractions' and were screened between feature films. The format was structurally simple — short sequences from the upcoming film, with text intertitles announcing the title and release date.
The form remained largely unchanged through the 1920s and 1930s. Trailers were typically two to four minutes long, included extensive dialogue from the film (often presenting the film's best lines), and were produced by the studios' own marketing departments rather than by specialised trailer houses.
After World War II, the production of trailers became a specialised industry. The two dominant trailer-production companies of the post-war period were National Screen Service (which produced most American studio trailers from the 1940s through the 1970s) and Cinema Concepts (which would become a major player from the 1960s onward). The specialisation gave the form its first sustained creative-craft development.
The trailer of the 1950s and 1960s was significantly more text-heavy than contemporary trailers. Voiceover and title cards carried most of the narrative work. Music was typically the film's own score. The pacing was slower — a typical 1960s trailer might run three to four minutes, with extended sequences from the film delivered with minimal cutting.
Don LaFontaine, the American voice actor whose voiceover work defined American film trailers from roughly 1965 until his death in 2008, narrated approximately 5,000 trailers across his career. His specific opening — 'In a world…' — became the most-imitated voiceover convention in cinema marketing.
LaFontaine's tonal register — deep, declarative, slightly mock-epic — was the auditory signature of American film marketing for forty years. Almost every film of any genre eventually received the LaFontaine treatment. The convention became culturally familiar to the point of self-parody by the 1990s. The 2007 short Five Men in a Limo, featuring LaFontaine and four other major trailer-voice actors, became a viral cultural artefact that codified the form's self-aware late period.
The 1996 trailer for Independence Day, produced by Aspect Ratio and structured around the destruction of the White House, established a new visual-action approach to blockbuster trailers. The trailer foregrounded a single iconic spectacle moment; the marketing arc became 'see the spectacle' rather than 'meet the characters.' The 1998 trailer for Armageddon and the 1999 trailer for The Matrix extended the approach.
The pattern produced what was, by the mid-2000s, called 'trailer logic' — the structural assumption that the trailer's job is to deliver the film's most-spectacular sequence to the audience in advance, on the assumption that audiences would not pay for tickets without proof that the spectacle existed. The 2010s blockbuster trailer is, in some sense, the late form of this tradition.
The 2010s and 2020s have produced a structurally different trailer economy. Trailers are now released on YouTube, social media, and streaming-platform interfaces rather than exclusively in cinemas. The view counts on YouTube trailers are now part of the marketing calculus; trailers that fail to generate first-day view counts may be re-cut or replaced.
The most-significant contemporary shift has been the proliferation of multiple trailers per film. A major studio release may now have a teaser trailer (typically 60-90 seconds, released six to twelve months before launch), a full trailer (typically 2-2.5 minutes, released two to four months before launch), and one or more 'final' trailers (released in the final weeks). Each is calibrated for a specific audience-acquisition stage.
The most-frequent contemporary criticism of trailers is that they reveal too much of their films. The complaint dates back at least to the 1990s but has accelerated in the streaming era. A typical contemporary blockbuster trailer may include footage from the second act and even the third act of the film. The marketing assumption is that the audience must see the spectacle to be persuaded to attend; the trade-off is that audiences arriving at the cinema have already seen significant portions of the film.
Several directors have publicly resisted the practice. Christopher Nolan has consistently advocated for shorter, more-mysterious trailers (the Inception teaser revealed almost nothing of the actual plot). Denis Villeneuve has done similar work for the Dune films. The directors who can negotiate creative control of their marketing materials produce trailers that match their films' aesthetic; the directors who cannot, produce films whose audience has already seen the highlights before walking into the cinema.