*Spoilers ahead for The Sheep Detectives, Project Hail Mary, and E.T.*
On my way to the movie theater with my family, I was excited to watch The Sheep Detectives for the first time. The movie has a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and 96% audience score on the Popcornmeter. When the end credits started to roll, I felt like I had just watched The Sheep Detectives for a second time. The trailer had revealed so much of the movie and laid out several key plot points: the shepherd reads murder mysteries to his flock, gets poisoned, leaves behind a $30 million will, and his sheep decide to solve the crime themselves.
Movie trailers that reveal too much of the movie plot ruin the fun of watching a movie. Instead of keeping the most exciting parts of the story a secret, trailers leave no room for the excitement of the surprise.
When I watched the official trailer for Project Hail Mary, the trailer gave away the story’s biggest twist by showing the alien, Rocky, who teams up with the main character, Ryland Grace. Grace is a teacher who is forced to go on a space mission to study a cosmic problem that could destroy the sun and end all life. By showing Rocky, the trailer ruined the excitement because it took away the story’s main mystery. Instead of letting the audience feel Grace’s loneliness and isolation, the trailer showed that Grace had Rocky.
A better movie trailer is the official E.T. trailer. The trailer shows a young boy looking into a dark toolshed with a flashlight, followed by a quick glimpse of a strange, glowing hand. The trailer does not show the famous bicycle flight across the moon, nor does it show E.T. getting sick or leaving at the end. It gives you the setup—a boy meets an alien—but it saves the surprises for the actual movie.
Even though I can’t stand trailers that spoil movies, student movie reviewer Rosalie Cresap enjoys them.
“I like movie trailers because they help you see what you’re getting into when you start watching the movie,” Cresap said. “You don’t want to waste two hours of your life watching a movie that you wouldn’t even like in the first place.”
Trailers can help audiences make informed decisions without revealing major plot developments. Trailers should set up the who, what, and where so audiences can understand the setup of the story without seeing how it resolves. If you know what will happen, it ruins the point of a movie, to entertain and surprise the audience.
I understand that movie studios compete for attention against streaming, video games, and social media in a spoiler economy, but that doesn’t mean trailers should feel forced to give away the entire plot just to guarantee an immediate hook.
