Teaser or Theatrical Trailer: What Each One Is For

A teaser and a theatrical trailer are both previews, but they do different jobs at different points in a campaign. The teaser announces; the trailer sells. The film marketing section has the other pieces.

Side by side

What a teaser is

A teaser trailer is a short trailer and a form of teaser campaign advertising. It contains a little material from the advertised film, and it often carries hinted, cryptic, curiosity-inducing messages. It is generally created during the shooting of the film and released before shooting is complete. Its purpose is less to tell the audience about a movie’s content than to let them know the movie is coming up in the near future, and to add to the hype. Teasers are usually made for big-budget and popularly themed movies, and studios often choose one as the first contact with the audience, especially if the movie is still deep in production.

Length and timing are conventions, not rules. The Da Vinci Code teaser was released even before a single frame of the movie had been shot, and the Cloverfield teaser ran longer than a minute. Teasers often have no dialogue, and they may feature scenes or alternate versions of scenes that are not in the finished film. Some use “special shoot” material created specifically for advertising that does not appear in the actual film. Teasers build mystery; trailers close the sale. They often use non-linear or abstract approaches, where trailers follow a conventional three-act structure of setup, escalation and climax.

An early example was the teaser for the 1978 Superman film by Richard Donner, designed to re-invigorate interest in a film whose release had been delayed.

Teasers for a film event

Some teasers became events on their own:

• Phantom Menace’s first teaser (Star Wars: Episode I) was attached to The Siege, A Bug’s Life and Meet Joe Black, and it was reported that people had paid for admission just to watch it and then walked out.
• The Cloverfield teaser ran one and a half minutes, with no movie title; only the producer’s name, J. J. Abrams, and a release date were shown.
• The first Force Awakens teaser, released on November 28, 2014, ran 88 seconds, and a second teaser shown on April 16, 2015 ran two minutes.
• The first Spider-Man teaser was pulled from theaters following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

What a theatrical trailer is

A trailer is a short advertisement, also known as a preview, coming attraction or attraction video, that highlights key scenes of upcoming features intended to be exhibited at a movie theater or cinema. It shows usually the most exciting or funny parts in abbreviated form and usually without spoilers, and the scenes are not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the film. DVD and Blu-ray releases usually carry both the teaser and the theatrical trailers as special features.

The name is a leftover. Trailers were first shown after, or “trailing”, the feature film. That was found to be somewhat ineffective, because audiences often left immediately after the film. In major multiplex chains, about the first 20 minutes after the posted showtime goes to trailers.

How long can a trailer be?

The maximum length allowed by the MPA is 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and each studio or distributor may exceed it once a year. The theater owners’ association went shorter. Its 2014 in-theater marketing guidelines say trailers shall not exceed two minutes, with two exemptions per year per distributor, up to a maximum length of 3 minutes. They apply to advertising for movies scheduled for domestic release on or after 1 October 2014. The guideline is not mandatory, and it allows limited exceptions. This is the 2014 edition, and no newer version turned up, so read the numbers as the last published guideline, not a current rule.

The same guidelines set a timing rule: cinemas will advertise a wide release film no sooner than 150 days before its theatrical release date with trailers, and 120 days on all other marketing materials. Trailers must carry the release date once it has been set. Exhibitors place only trailers with content appropriate for the feature, and each theater owner decides which trailers to play.

The MPA runs a Classification and Rating Administration and an Advertising Administration, and it reviews advertising only for rated films and films being rated. It also rates trailers, print advertising and posters. A rating card appears at the head of a trailer in the United States to show how closely it adheres to the MPA’s standards. A red card goes to a trailer approved only for restricted or mature audiences, and it is reserved for trailers previewing R and NC-17 rated films.

How trailers changed

National Screen Service was formed in 1920 to produce and distribute movie trailers on behalf of the studios. Early trailers leaned on large descriptive text and an underscore pulled from studio music libraries. In the early 1960s the face of the trailer changed: textless, montage trailers and quick editing became popular.

Andrew J. Kuehn is credited with revolutionizing the American film trailer in the early 1960s. In 1964 he distributed his trailer for Night of the Iguana, which used stark, high-contrast photography, fast-paced editing and narration by a young James Earl Jones. He thought of trailers as songs, two or three minutes long. More recently, many trailers have begun with a 5- to 10-second preview of the trailer, sometimes called a “micro-teaser”, in the mid-to-late 2010s. TV spots are often shortened to 30–60 seconds.

Where the tagline fits

A tagline travels with both formats, and it can change between them: Alien’s first trailer and teaser poster carried “A word of warning…” before “In space no one can hear you scream” took over. If you came here for that story, read the Alien tagline page; for the lines of a whole decade, the 1970s movie taglines list.