Film Trailer Deception EXPOSED: How to Spot the Lies | Invosstigation #1

[Music] thank you have two choices you can be the destroyer of this world [Music] that we wouldn't notice but we did Hollywood used these shots and trailers to get us to buy tickets and then when we showed up expecting to see Hulk's jungle jog on the big screen nope why does this happen I'm Eric Voss and this is the Deep dive in this video instead of diving deep into one movie I will be conducting an investigation today's episode how to know when trailers are lying I love movie trailers I've analyzed hundreds of them trailers have evolved from simple sales pitches to really the first peak of a narrative roller coaster that lasts months of Our Lives we now expect a trailer to be a transparent promise of a movie's premise and spectacle that doesn't spoil too much of the plot and works artistically as a short film in its own right but like all advertising trailers use deception actually last year I broke down the four types of trailer deception when a trailer shot intended to be a movie actually ends up deleted from the final cut during post-production when trailer shots are altered with the effects to prevent Fox spoilers when shots are presented out of context to create tonal Mr X and when Studios use Glamor Shots never actually intended to be in the film's Final Cut in order to entice viewers this was the case with a shot of Iron Man and Spider-Man gliding side by side in a trailer for 2017 Spider-Man homecoming that was never planned to be in the movie but I concluded that so long is the movie on the whole delivers on the promise in this case Peter and Tony's relationship was the heart of homecoming a bit of deception is Justified but then in 2022 morbius the living vampire burned all of that trust to the ground this movie's trailer is Promised crossovers with Spider-Man and Spider-Man villains but these shots and scenes were removed from the film until a mere Spider-Man mentioned was awkwardly jammed into the movie's BS post-credits scene but morbius wasn't alone moviegoers have increasingly been feeling similar Whiplash with movies like Thor 11 Thunder which had trailers promising a killing spree from Gore the god butcher but director taikum TT removed Gore's murder scenes and really relegated this villain to a comedic kidnapping plot and now a federal judge has permitted a false advertising lawsuit to move forward plaintiff's suing Universal Studios over the 2019 Beatles movie yesterday after the movie's trailers showed Ana de armas before the director cut this storyline so here's the truth that I think we should keep in mind whenever we see trailers and as I on this channel give you a peek under the hood at my investigation process all trailers lie but faithful trailers lie to make our film going experience more authentic and dishonest trailers lie to hide uncertainties that the studio has about the project good trailers are like magicians who use misdirection to make you feel rewarded at the end of the show bad trailers are like three card Monty scam artists who use misdirection to steal your 20 bucks so how do we know if investing our time and money into a movie will be worth it well to make these smart financial decisions for ourselves we really must know how trailers have evolved over time how they're crafted and the competing ways Studios and audience thank about them so why are they even called trailers well it's because the idea of exhibiting trailers started in 1913 when a cinema advertising manager named Nils granland produced a short film for the Marcus Lowe theater chain promoting a Broadway musical called the pleasure seekers then in 1914 Grant Lynn did the same for a Charlie Chaplin film and we were Off to the Races but these promos would play after the main feature trailing it and thus these were called trailers problem was audiences would often leave when the movie ended so the theater managers started to roll these before the main features but the name trailers stuck later on in the 1960s Stanley Kubrick re-conceived this process after seeing a Canadian short film called very nice very nice and he cut a trailer for his film doctor Strangelove and a similar fast-paced Montage style and that completely changed the game trailers began using suspenseful narration and scoring like the trailer for Steven Spielberg's Jaws there is a creature alive today who has survived millions of years of evolution without change without passion and without logic Universal's teaser for Jurassic Park in 1993 didn't include any footage from the movie whatsoever the first discovery was made in the spring of 1990. from a mine in South America came a piece of Amber containing the fossilized remains of a prehistoric mosquito I grew up in the 1990s when it seemed like every trailer was near I don LaFontaine this time there are two Terminator two [Music] Gotham life until 1998 when a trailer for Star Wars The Phantom Menace was so popular fans would actually buy tickets to screens of Meet Joe Black and then leave right after that Star Wars trailer played in the previews now this trailer was simply a montage of film shots John Williams score of course in text and it has more or less been the popular format used from here forward but this also created an expectation that for genre movies and major franchises like Star Wars what we see in the trailer imagery will be what we see in the final movie inviting more and more band scrutiny now meanwhile an art house style of trailer editing grew in popularity from editors like Mark Woolen who cut a trailer for the 2006 film little children cut to the sounds of a coming train woolen's also the guy who edited the amazing trailer for the 2010 film The Social Network using the music of a Swedish girls choir covering radiohead's creep over close-ups of the Facebook website foreign what's interesting though is neither this song nor these shots were used anywhere in the film nowadays trailers tend to be montages of film footage cut to some iconic song many of the big ones that you've seen and ones that I've broken down on the new rockstars Channel have been edited by guys like Andrew Hagley who works in Disney's promotion Department he worked on the teaser trailers for black panther black panther were kind of forever shung Chi eternals the Mandalorian and I really love something Andrew told Kevin Smith and Mark Bernardin on their Batman Beyond podcast about his creative approach to editing teaser trailers I like to think of uh trailers as the especially teaser trailers which are more mood building the if you watched a movie and then you fell asleep and you had a dream about it the trailer is the dream you had ah so Andrew draws an important distinction between the teaser phase and the trailer phase of a film's marketing life cycle four to five months before a film's release comes the teaser which introduces the tone the theme the principal characters but it's really mostly about making an impression then two to three months before release an official trailer which reveals more of the world in the plot and appeals to the four quadrants that refers to men and women under and over 25 years old then about six weeks to one month before a movie's release the tickets on sale trailer which really showcases the movie's fireworks because they really got to make the sales pitch that this movie's gonna be worth your money and then this kicks off a final month countdown of weekly and daily promos and TV spots these often include some spoilers now there's an old Hollywood saying that a film is really written three times written on the page and then Rewritten as you shoot it on set and then Rewritten one final time as you edit it sometimes they add a fourth time when a movie is cast but this idea of rewriting a movie as you edit it is especially true for Marvel Studios which is known for taking its films through several rounds of reshoots and then the final version of the film is only locked in during the final weeks of post-production actually the post-credits scene for 2012's Avengers was shot just a week before the release after the movie's official Hollywood Premiere this was after the point that Chris Evans started growing a beard for his next movie role of Snowpiercer which is why in that shot you can see him covering his face and so often footage shown back in those early teasers later changes or just gets removed from the Final Cut of the movie that was definitely the case with the infamous Hulk running shot in that Infinity War trailer The Producers totally intended Bruce to Hulk out in the final battle of that film but late in production they decided that Bruce's successful Hulk out would have been too much of a victory for the movie's Downer ending but still this gives us a decent barometer for when to be skeptical of trailer footage the very first teaser is more of a thematic suggestion than a shot for shot promise of what will be in the final version of a movie now that's not to say that these teasers are worth ignoring on the contrary everything we see in these teasers is definitely part of the creative team's vision for the film I think the shots that get cut give us a rare look into how difficult and sacrificial the filmmaking process is but we also need to think about where in a single trailer deception tends to occur trailers always follow their own narrative structure that tend to have three acts act one set up the context in the tone Act 2 showcases spectacle the movie and then act three tease the conflict so basically the story of every trailer is act one a hero Act 2 enters an unfamiliar Place act 3 and faces a threat but it's not what you think that third act especially for early teasers is where according to my research misdirection is the likeliest to occur trailers are edited to lead fans on a cliffhanger mystery designed to generate as much Buzz as possible I call this the hero shot usually this hero shot comes right before or right after the final title the Hulk Avengers running hero shot was at the end of that first Infinity War teaser the second Infinity War trailer ended with a hero shot of cap holding back Thanos but the bfx artist actually scrubbed two of the infinity zones out of the gauntlet to keep it a mystery how many stones Thanos would acquire in this movie that Spider-Man Iron Man hero shot was at the end of the first homecoming teaser the Spider-Man no way home second trailer ended with that hero shot of Peter swinging across the Statue of Liberty which of course had been V of X scrub to remove the other two Peters the teaser for Star Wars Rogue one and that movie's trailer both ended with hero shots that were removed when that movie's third Act was reworked late in production and the morbius teaser the shots of the Spider-Man graffiti and Michael Keaton's Cameo came in that trailer's final section most of the time it seems when these hero shots are changed between the trailer in the release of the film it is done to try to excite us for the heroics of the scene while extracting the character from a context that might spoil the plot from the artist's perspective it is for our benefit like magician deliberately misdirecting us so that that Prestige hits with greater impact get the out of my house and so when trailers seem to be showing us all their cards in the dramatic climax hero shot they're really often hiding one of two things either one this movie's got the goods and we don't want to spoil them for you yet or two we're taking a risk and we're worried that if we show you the big reveal out of context you might hate it and we hope this movie when you see it will win you over now the Risk Takers aren't always bad or unethical for example the mystery hero shot at the end of the very first will kind of forever teaser this was a gamble Marvel Studios New fans might have mixed reactions to shuri being the New Black Panther so instead they gave us only a mystery silhouette who could have been anyone at that point Nakia Okoye mbaku even resurrected killmonger they manipulated our imaginations that they knew we would deploy and they even managed to fulfill the wildness of those Expectations by bringing back killmonger in another way so when we cross-reference the acts of a trailer with every movie's marketing life cycle the trailer shots most likely to contain misleading claims are the act 3 hero shots of the earliest teasers meaning the closer to a movie's release date that we get the less likely the trailer footage is dishonest why is this the case well at this point in a movie's production the pick picture is more likely to be locked in at that point and the studio knows what is and what isn't going to be in the final version and the final trailers and promos will contain the footage most likely to be circulated on TV and social media and the studios want that marketing to be the closest to the experience bands will have in the theater but one challenge to that rule is now facing major legal consequences the 2019 Danny Boyle film yesterday Stars himesh Patel as Jack a musician who wakes up one day to realize the world has never heard of The Beatles the trailers for this film included a scene of Jack's serenading on a de armas on a talk show this scene was cut from the film but even a trailer that released just three weeks before the film's release this Anna to armist shot continued to be used in the marketing later on two moviegoers sued Universal claiming false advertising in these trailers this actually was not the first lawsuit of this kind a Michigan moviegoer sued a film distributor over the 2011 film Drive starring Ryan Gosling claiming the film's trailers depicting a car chase action film were false advertising as the movie ended up being a slower more violent Noir Art House film the case was dismissed but for this yesterday lawsuit Universal tried to get the case thrown out arguing that a trailer is quote artistic expressive work that tells a three-minute story conveying the theme of the movie and should thus be considered non-commercial speech they cited in their briefing that Jurassic Park teaser that I mentioned earlier which contained no footage from the movie however U.S District Court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled against Universal's motion for dismissal writing quote Universal is correct that trailers involve some creativity and editorial discretion but this creativity does not outweigh the commercial nature of a trailer at its core a trailer is an advertisement designed to sell a movie by providing consumers with a preview of the movie so this case will proceed for now in the United States we have broad protections for artistic speech but those protections only extend so far to commercial speech and various states have laws that punish false advertising when it comes to Hollywood speech historically the courts have cared more about things like obscenity and are otherwise reluctant to regulate many would say because the film industry plays nice with the npaa which also reviews trailers for audience suitable ability some nice and green for all audiences some red band for us sickos in the unlikely event that all rulings go against Universal and they're all upheld this would completely change the way trailers are made if a studio were to use a shot in a trailer or other marketing materials they would be required to keep those shots unaltered in the theatrical cut of the movie our films and their trailers art which implies a more interpretive experience or are they transactions in which there is an expectation of exact goods and services delivered Studios want audiences to see their work as an Eclectic tasting menu presented with a flare of mystery and many of us hungrily sign up for that but some moviegoers want a straightforward burger that looks exactly as it does on the menu but if you're the one who just wants a cheeseburger prepare to be disappointed because trailers at the end of the day are just deceptive by Nature either by Studios hiding their anxieties or just trying to entice us while masking their big twists so that we enjoy the story more but all expectation management involves withholding some information so how do we know when a trailer is lying well that final hero out of the first teaser very good chance something's up with it but how do we know when the deception is worth it well A good rule of thumb in my experience if it looks like something was taken out of a shot or covered up they probably got the goods but if it looks like something was put in or they're showing us way too much they're probably compensating for something so this investigator's advice is don't treat movies like fast food and Savor the mystery movie trailers Delight in being Schrodinger's boxes where the film inside is simultaneously both a Timeless hero and a forgettable imposter thank you so much for taking this deep dive investigation with me into movie trailer deception this deep dive Channel plans to continue weekly film deep Dives and do investigations like these a little less frequently but I want to know from you what needy media trends would you like me to investigate next be sure to check out one of our other in-depth videos that also uploaded the channel here on launch day my deep Dives of everything everywhere all at once One Division or Loki or my live breakdown of Ant-Man the Watson Mania please subscribe to the Deep dive turn notifications on and share this channel in its content with everyone you know thank you for all the support so far and I will see you next week my divers of the deep [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The Deep Dive

Views: 376,369

Keywords: marvel, marvel trailer, disney, movie trailer, film trailer, trailer analysis, trailer breakdown, trailer reaction, deep dive, erik voss, quantumania, avengers infinity war, infinity war trailer, avengers trailer, new rockstars, trailer deception, trailers lie, invosstigation, no way home, no way home trailer

Id: N21hoR11dhI

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023