Would I lie to you? Researching audience attitudes to, and uses of, the promotional trailer format

Abstract

Abstract

Selling “Silence” in Contemporary Horror: Krasinski’s Quiet Consumers

“…For example, the trailer played in theatres during previews for the highest-grossing film of 2017-Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi-and new teaser footage debuted during the 2018 Superbowl pregame, which was watched by over 100 million viewers. 16 In their qualitative and quantitative research on film trailer audiences, Fred L. Greene, Keith M. Johnston, and Ed Vollans (2016) question the reading of trailers as linear paratexts that exist only in relation to the feature films they are intended to sell. Rather, the researchers recognize the significance of the trailer today as a complex media form in its own right, noting that audiences interact with trailers in ways that differ from other promotional materials: newspapers such as The Guardian, media websites such as Den of Geek, and industry publications such as The Wrap all commonly feature breakdowns of new trailers.…”

So just what is a trailer, anyway?

“…Studies of audiences and trailers have been conducted, but these focus on preselected stimuli (Eastman et al, 1985;Barker and Mathijs, 2008;Davis et al, 2013), while the work that comments upon audience attitudes have little progressed beyond asides that reiterate popular criticism dating back to the earliest writing on the cinema industry (Audienscope, 1977;Kernan, 2004;Lewis, 1933). Work by Johnston (2009Johnston ( , 2013 and the output of Grainge and Johnson's (2015) Red Bee media project are helping to approach elements of this issue from an industrial perspective, while at the time of writing two ongoing studies seek to extrapolate this from the audience and industrial perspective (Greene et al, 2014;Deaville et al, 2014). In short, though Couldry's concept of textual definition through a shared understanding allows for considerations of the audience (and is arguably lurking implicitly in trailer studies that are oblique in their corpus generation), there is currently little evidence of audience attitudes to trailers to help inform such an audience led definition and the trailer remains a largely idealised theoretical entity.…”