A trailer or preview is an advertisement or a commercial for a feature film that will be shown in the future at a cinema. Trailers consist of a series of selected shots from the film being advertised. Since the purpose of the trailer is to attract an audience to the film, these selected shots are usually drawn from the most exciting, funny, or otherwise noteworthy parts of the film but in abbreviated form and usually without producing spoilers. For this purpose the scenes are not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the film. A trailer has to achieve that in less than two and a half minutes, the maximum length allowed by the MPAA. Each studio or distributor is allowed to exceed this time limit once a year; if they feel it is necessary for a particular film.
The first trailer shown in a U.S. movie theatre was in November 1913, when Nils Granlund, the advertising manager for the Marcus Loew theatre chain, produced a short promotional film for the musical The Pleasure Seekers, opening at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. Movie trailers have now become popular on DVDs and Blu-ray Discs, as well as on the Internet. Of some 10-billion videos watched online annually, movie trailers rank #3, after news and user-created video. There are two types of movie trailers:
Teaser trailers: A teaser trailer is a short trailer used to advertise an upcoming film, television program, computer game or similar, usually released long in advance of the product to ‘tease’ the audience. Movie teasers, unlike typical theatrical trailers, are usually very short in length (between 30–60 seconds) and usually contain little, if any, actual footage from the film. Teaser trailers are usually only made for big-budget and popularly themed movies. Their purpose is less to tell the audience about a movie's content than simply to let them know that the movie is coming up in the near future, and to add to the hype of the upcoming release. Teaser trailers are often made while the film is still in production or being edited and as a result they may feature scenes or alternate versions of scenes that are not in the finished film. Teaser trailers today are increasingly focused on internet downloading and the convention circuit. An early example of the teaser trailer was the one for the Superman film by Richard Donner. The film was already nearly a year late; it was designed to re-invigorate interest in the release. The teaser for the Batman film starring Michael Keaton was an emergency marketing move that successfully convinced angered comic book fans that the film would respect the source material.
Below is an example of a teaser trailer from the film ‘Brave’ (2012):
Theatrical trailers:
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