With the very first ever trailer being a promotional short of the Broadway play The Pleasure Seekers, the year 1912 marks the very beginning of the history of movie trailers, inspiring more works in demand beyond innovation. However, it was the serial The Adventures of Kathlyn that managed to wow people with volume one sneak peeks at the very end of each episode to entice viewers for the next episode’s release.
The term trailer was first used in 1917 when the New York Times referred to it as a follow or trail of the main content. In 1919, he created National Screen Service (NSS) and began producing trailers for Hollywood studios. These short films were formed from the extractors of films, attention grabs were added to them to catch the eye of the audience. This arrangement helped the producers get traction to fill the gap of monetizing marketing tools by designing quite a number of ingenious film advertisements.
In the late ’30s, trailers were initially shown at the end of films, but it was only after the trailers were moved to the beginning that moviemakers noticed an increase in audience attraction and later decided to put trailers at the beginning of movies. The emergence of creative directors in the ’60s meant manufacturers regained control over the production of previews which saw the formation of trailer departments who would even write songs for the trailers.
Things started to change once Jaws came out (1975). Paramount Pictures decided to break all rules by releasing the film concurrently in 464 theaters while pouring an insane part of the budget on marketing the film. The film was much anticipated, fascinatingly, even a week before the film’s release, 25 different thirty-second promos for the movie were shown. The successful run of Jaws would stabilize the advertising by blockbuster algorithms for a long time, which expanded the saturation marketing trend and exposure.
In the decades that followed, trailers developed a form which was more rigidly structured and generally consisted of three parts: a synopsis of the storyline, a description of the film, and fast-paced, often music-accompanied, cuts to action shots ending the trailer. The contemporary one evolved with the help of such an individual as Joseph Farrell, who was the one who got the idea for this particular approach. Surveys were also introduced in order to determine what sort of content was in demand and what people wanted to see, at times even influencing the films themselves.
Even though a few studios tried to change its name into ‘preview’ or any other word, the public has somehow fallen in love with the term ‘trailer’. And up to today, trailers have remained the most important tool for marketing a film, although many actors and actresses such as Margot Robbie have been complaining about the revealing of too many ‘tricks’ a movie has to offer.