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Illustrating the power of paratexts with a playfully parodic nod was a brief video released in spring 2008 by the online satirical news outlet The Onion. “Iron Man,” the Onion News Network’s faux anchor announced, “was one of the most popular trailers of last summer, but controversy is sweeping the fan community today, following the announcement that Paramount Pictures is planning to adapt the beloved trailer into a feature-length motion picture” (fig. I.1). He then cut to a supposed entertainment reporter, who noted mixed reaction to the controversial plan to make a movie of the trailer:

Fig. I.1. The Onion News Network speculates on whether fans will accept the film adaptation of the Iron Man trailer.

The Iron Man trailer is near and dear to a lot of fans’ hearts, so you can imagine how worried people are about this news. Apparently, the plan is to expand that fast montage of very short shots seen in the trailer into full-length, distinct scenes, and in between those scenes, they plan to add additional scenes that weren’t in the trailer.

She also speculated on the prospects of the studio taking the fan favorite Gwyneth Paltrow, whose “notable” appearance in the trailer they clocked at three-quarters of a second, and placing her at the center of a “tedious romantic subplot that [is] twenty or thirty minutes long.” Both “reporters” react with mock incredulity at the notion that Paramount would jeopardize “the integrity of the trailer” and risk “alienating the trailer’s core fan base” with such a move, but the entertainment reporter reassures viewers that at least Paramount has announced that they will keep everything that audiences loved, “right down to actual lines from the trailer,” and have even brought Robert Downey, Jr., back to “reprise” his role from the trailer, and that they will release the film with eight “entirely new entertainment-packed trailers. So, even if the movie is no good, hopefully the trip to the theater will be worth it anyway.”

The item plays with many anxieties of consuming media in a hype-, synergy-, and franchise-filled era, in particular the concern that the ads can prove better than the product itself, and that adaptations risk killing the core elements of the original. In doing so, it points to how complex our interactions with media are, and to how contingent they are on anticipation and expectation, on networks of paratexts, and on previous relationships to a story, character, actor, or genre. The parodic clip suggests the degree to which many if not all people going to watch the Iron Man film (2008) will already have started the process of making sense of it. Those who have read Iron Man comics, or perhaps played Marvel videogames, will have a sense of what lies ahead, as will (in different ways) those with a past knowledge of Downey’s, Paltrow’s, or director Jon Favreau’s work. And many will have seen the trailer, which was indeed spectacular, thereby creating the groundwork for the Onion News Network’s parodic story. Others will have seen posters, visited the website, read reviews, and heard or read interviews with Downey, Paltrow, or Favreau. Some viewers will have had expectations created simply due to the cinema in which the movie was playing, or due to the friends who invited them to come see it. Meanwhile, of course, thousands will have avoided the film, whether due to its genre, cast, or any of the above-mentioned instances of hype and synergy. In short, then, if we really wanted to make sense of the “moment” of interaction between film and audience, we would need to explore all those things that preceded the film, set the frames through which audience members would make sense of it, and set the stage for the kind of movie-going experience they would have. As categorically absurd as The Onion’s suggestion that the trailer has “integrity” to uphold might seem, the trailer would play a key role in determining how audiences came to the cinema, and what they came expecting. The film would have begun in earnest, then, with the trailer, or with the comics, the videogames, the interviews, the reviews, the ads, and so forth. The text, the essence, of Iron Man began long before the film hit theaters, so that when the film finally arrived, yes, it could radically revise that text, but it would not be working with a blank slate; rather, it would need to work through, with, and/or in spite of the multiple meanings that had already begun to form in audiences’ minds.

However, this book is not simply arguing that paratexts start texts, for they also create them and continue them. Thus, this book is also about the paratexts that we find after a text has officially begun, and that continue to give us information, ways of looking at the film or show, and frames for understanding it or engaging with it. Their work is never over, and their effects on what the film or show is—on what it means to its audiences—are continual.

The Onion News Network’s short clip plays with the notion of continuing paratexts, too, for in its suggestion that the integrity of the trailer might be jeopardized by the movie, the clip reflects on how each new iteration of a text—wherever it may be, and of whatever length (ninety seconds or ninety minutes)—can affect the public understanding of, appreciation of, and identification with that text. Quite simply, a “bad” adaptation will inevitably affect the public standing of a text, just as would a “good” one. But to be able to call an adaptation “good” or “bad” requires an audience member or community to have developed a notion of the ideal and proper text, and in this book I will argue that paratexts play as much of a role as does the film or television program itself in constructing how different audience members will construct this ideal text.