A while back, I did an op-ed on film marketing and movie trailers and how important those are to getting people to theaters to see movies. The idea of a movie trailer is almost as old as the industry itself. The importance of a movie trailer cannot be understated. It is one of the most, if not the most important aspect of film marketing, especially in today’s world. With the advent of the World Wide Web and modern social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook, it’s a lot easier for trailers to be seen. Back in the days before YouTube, you had to actually go to the theater in order to see them or wait until the film came out on video. Trailers are used for one thing: Get the audience excited about a movie. You want to show them enough to get a taste for what they’re about to see, but keep enough hidden for them to want more. It’s a balancing act that sometimes doesn’t work, but when it does, it can move mountains. But what movie trailer out there can claim to change how movie marketing is consumed? I bring you to this:
Let me set the stage: Back in November of 1998, a new Star Trek movie had been released. Star Trek: Insurrection was the latest in the Next Generation-era of Star Trek films. My parents and I had decided to go see this movie at the Water Gardens movie theater in Pleasant Grove, Utah. After sitting down, the lights dimmed and the trailers started playing. What was the first one? Star Wars – Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. At that point, Star Trek had become irrelevant. Here we were sitting, having just watched the teaser trailer for the 1st Star Wars movie in 15-16 years. As soon as the Lucasfilm logo appeared and the music from the original film started playing, the game had changed. Sure, we stayed and watched Star Trek, but we couldn’t get that Star Wars trailer out of our minds. This is why this particular trailer was so important. We weren’t the only ones that were hooked by it. People around the world bought tickets to movies that they wouldn’t have seen otherwise to see this trailer. From Star Trek: Insurrection to Meet Joe Black, this trailer alone boosted sales of tickets to the films that it was attached to, making them successful, even if the movies themselves weren’t that great.
For Star Wars nerds such as myself, this was a mind-blowing trailer. When it came to internet marketing at the time, most people were still on those old 56k modems. If you remember those, those weren’t great days, because it took hours to load the trailer for everybody else to see. That’s where Apple came in and offered downloadable versions of these big blockbuster trailers. Again, it took a Star Wars movie to change the game. Instead of movie-making, it was marketing. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many times I watched the trailers for this movie. Up until the film’s release in May of 1999, the trailers for The Phantom Menace were watched million upon millions of times, making it one of the most-watched trailers in cinematic history. Now, did the final film live up to expectations? Initially, yes. Over time, however, people got over the excitement of a new Star Wars movie and began to notice the issues that the film had in terms of dialogue and acting. It was not a great movie and was quickly over-shadowed by the likes of The Matrix. Personally, I enjoyed the movie, and I still do. It was the first Star Wars movie I had seen in theaters, so it was special to me in that regard. I was 16 years old, and I was already a huge fan of Star Wars.
That initial excitement over a trailer is what drove the film’s success, ultimately. The people behind the marketing of the film knew exactly what buttons to push and what not to do. The original trailer was absolutely brilliant. It touched on people’s nostalgia for the property while exciting them for the prospect of an entire new series of films. I mean, the film would have been successful based on name recognition alone, but that one trailer sent people’s anticipation into the stratosphere. Outside of Avengers: Endgame, very few movies have had trailers that generated that much excitement for a single movie. Normally, I wouldn’t dedicate an entire post to a single trailer, but I had watched a newly-released documentary today, Movie Trailers: A Love Story that was directed by John Campea, a YouTuber that I watch on a regular basis. I’ll talk about the documentary in a different post, but it was a film that got me thinking about THIS particular trailer and how significant it was and still is in the film industry. While The Phantom Menace isn’t the greatest movie ever made, the trailer that sold it is still one of the best trailers I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. THIS is how you do a movie trailer. Even the Sequel Trilogy understands how to market a movie. To me, the teaser trailer for The Phantom Menace is the gold-standard for movie trailers.