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Trailers and previews have rarely warranted much attention from media studies critics, except as yet more advertising. But Hollywood takes them very seriously, and so it should. If we consider that most films make over a third of their box office in their opening week,⁶ and since high opening-week box office figures have a compounding effect, giving rise to further hype to bring in audiences for the rest of a film’s run, we cannot underestimate the importance of a good trailer to the film industry. If a film triumphs in its opening week, good promos will have played a significant role in this victory. Thus, on average, movie studios will budget $10 million per film for producing the marketing, even before adding triple that figure on ad buys.⁷ Some even hire multiple agencies to compete with each other for the best trailer.⁸ Meanwhile, the television industry similarly dedicates large amounts of money, time, and labor to hyping its shows. Especially in late summer, before the new television season begins, many cities are covered with various forms of advertising, as entire public transportation systems and roadways seem to be sponsored by the networks, newspapers garner full-page ads for new shows, and stars do the rounds of the talk show circuit. As with film, previews prove remarkably important for a television show’s tentative early weeks: many seasons have seen shows canceled after only two or three episodes, when Nielsen ratings are more effectively measuring how many viewers the promos attracted than how interesting the show is in and of itself.

The lone book-length study of film trailers, Lisa Kernan’s Coming Attractions, opens on the note that trailers are “a unique form of narrative film exhibition, wherein promotional discourse and narrative pleasure are conjoined.” Playing with Tom Gunning’s famous discussion of a cinema of attractions,⁹ Kernan notes that trailers are “a cinema of (coming) attractions.”¹⁰ As with all promos, they are ads, but they are also a taste test of films to come, offering some of a film’s first pleasures, meanings, and ideas. Film fans have long enjoyed arriving early at the cinema in order to catch a glimpse of what movies to expect a month or season from now. Trailers have thus become an important part of the cinema-going experience and ritual, serving as the transitional, liminal device that navigates us from a loud theater with unruly teens, over-affectionate lovers, and people on their cell phones, to a world of celluloid dreams and spectatorial, narrative pleasures. Trailers announce and introduce the film that follows them by announcing the wonders of the medium in general, and they bring to a head the joys of anticipation, like the opening orchestral hum before a live performance. All the while, they help to reinforce cinema-going as a repetitive event,¹¹ promising that yet another voyage to the world of dreams awaits, and that though you are watching such-and-such a movie now, next time you can watch any one of these movies on offer. Television previews act similarly, encouraging us to keep watching or to return later in the week or month, and creating excitement and anticipation, whether for a new show, or for the next chapter in a continuing narrative.

Moreover, as Kernan argues, trailers circulate discourses of genre and of the star system, often even more so than do films themselves, promising the continued life of a beloved genre or star, extending the joys of cinema-going beyond the presentation at hand. She points out that trailers tend to concentrate their efforts (1) on delineating a film’s genre, (2) on celebrating and featuring its star(s), and/or (3) on providing an environmental sampling (as exemplified in the trite opening common to many trailers: “In a world where . . .”). Genre can be established before viewing,¹² outside the realm of the text, and yet since genre is not just a classificatory tool, but also a set of rules for interpreting a text,¹³ when trailers or other forms of promotion propose a genre, it may prove hard for an individual viewer to easily shrug off these rules. Barker, Arthurs, and Harindranth’s examination of would-be Crash viewers’ responses to its negative hype, discussed in the previous chapter, gives us a window into how constitutive preliminary paratextual frames can prove for subsequent viewing and interpretation.¹⁴ Genres can work as strong paratexts because they frequently enjoy communal definition and widespread use, and because they are cultural categories used by the industry, reviewers, audience members, politicians, and policy makers alike, often with a relatively shared or at least dominant definition at any given point in time.¹⁵ Thus to say or to imply that a film is an action film, an eco-thriller, a sports biopic, or a romantic comedy is to summon entire systems of distribution, reviewer interest, and audience participation and reaction, ensuring interest, disinterest, and/or specific forms of attention from given studios, theaters, audience members, and would-be censors. Trailers and other advertising play vital roles in announcing a film’s genre and in providing initial generic labels. Similarly, a star is his or her own generic signifier and inter-text (think of the different filmic meanings and uses of, for instance, Clint Eastwood, Julia Roberts, Neil Patrick Harris, or Miley Cyrus), thus also offering interpretive strategies and expectations. Environmental sampling, too, seeks to outline for potential viewers the sorts of things that might occur “in a world where . . .” As particularly strong paratexts, then, trailers and previews may dictate how to read a text.

The archetypal examples here are trailers for action films, which may introduce us to key characters and/or plotlines, but tend to eschew complexity in favor of multiple fighting scenes, car chases, elaborate stunts, and awe-inspiring pyrotechnics, all accompanied by fast-paced, energetic music. A trailer for an action film that concentrates too heavily on its romantic elements will read as a romance, just as one that concentrates too heavily on a thoughtful plot may risk reading as a drama. That said, well-made trailers can often use scene selection to manicure genre more subtly too. Kernan provides the example of Return of the Jedi’s (1983) trailer, which George Lucas used to try to insist that the film was not simply sci-fi, but rather a family adventure film.¹⁶ She also discusses Men in Black’s (1997) trailer, which hailed subcultural appeal by steeping itself in Will Smith’s urban cool, often bouncing this off Tommy Lee Jones as white straight man. Smith, she notes, “as the black man in black, thus adds a cool factor to the film’s characterological and star dynamics, and [. . .] serves as a comic aside to African-American audiences, assuming and asserting (through the rhetoric of stardom) that the film holds special appeal for them while also amusing whites.”¹⁷ Increasingly, films offer multiple trailers for different presumed audiences, as, for instance, when Bee Movie (2007) pegged itself as a kids’ film on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, but as the return of Jerry Seinfeld and his brand of urban ironic comedy on prime-time network television. Andrew Wernick argues that “a promotional message is a complex of significations which at once represents (moves in place of), advocates (moves on behalf of), and anticipates (moves ahead of) the circulating entities to which it refers,”¹⁸ and a significant part of that representation, advocacy, and anticipation is genred by nature.

Trailers and other forms of promotion serve a vital indexical purpose, too, since the mediascape is simply too large for any one of us to watch everything. Promos allow us to schedule our media consumption patterns, working as something akin to a menu for future consumption, and quickly helping us to consign texts to our personal Must Watch, Might Watch, or Do Not Watch lists. Many of us know and judge much of the media world through promos alone, with every one of us having seen thousands of trailers, posters, and previews for shows that we will never watch. Indeed, while promotional materials are constitutive in terms of hailing an audience for a text, they also create meanings for those who will not be in the audience. For every person who has watched any given film or television program, there are likely more who have watched a trailer, poster, or preview of it and yet not the thing itself. To popular culture, then, and hence to media studies’ subsequent analyses of what role a text plays in popular culture, the promo and its editor’s or producer’s meaning-making may prove more important than the meaning-making going on in the show itself. Even in the many instances in which a trailer results in us resolving to never watch the film, clearly some form of interpretation, judgment, and understanding has occurred without the show. As the term “preview” encapsulates, we have a paradoxical situation in which we can apparently view a text before viewing it.