The Battle for the Best Movie Trailer Since 1990
From ‘Independence Day’ to ‘Black Panther,’ our bracket will determine the greatest trailer in nearly 30 years of movies. We’ll be whittling down the field all week, while looking back on the history of the form, revisiting the most memorable music, and trying to figure out the great attraction of coming attractions.The Battle for the Best Movie Trailer Since 1990
From ‘Independence Day’ to ‘Black Panther,’ our bracket will determine the greatest trailer in nearly 30 years of movies. We’ll be whittling down the field all week, while looking back on the history of the form, revisiting the most memorable music, and trying to figure out the great attraction of coming attractions.
What’s the most you ever lost watching a movie trailer? Simply in time-spent terms, I have probably viewed the No Country for Old Men trailer more than any other. And I’ve certainly spent more cumulative time watching it than I have watching the actual Coen brothers movie. This should in no way be viewed as a personal assessment of the movie, which I adore. It’s more a product of the past 10 years, in which it’s become easier to study and obsess over advertisements than the actual product that they are promoting.
Released in the summer of 2007, shortly after the film’s debut at the Cannes Film Festival, and almost exactly two years after the publication of the Cormac McCarthy novel on which it was based, No Country for Old Men’s trailer is the first one I remember pressing onto other people. I’m sure there were other trailers that were sent around through instant message or email, and there were still more that captured the imagination, but to me the No Country for Old Men trailer had something unique: rewatchability.
I was working a low-intensity media job at the time, and I remember walking up to several coworkers and evangelizing for the two-and-a-half-minute clip. I was already a huge fan of the source material, and I couldn’t believe how faithfully the Coens had executed McCarthy’s vision, and frankly, my imagination. Almost every time I played the trailer for someone—right at the moment after Llewelyn Moss’s landlady asks Anton Chigurh if he would like to leave a message, and the storefront window shatters from the reverberations of a car bomb, and the sound of Moss sawing a shotgun mixes in with Two Steps From Hell’s “Diabolic Clockwork”—I would get the same reaction: a widening of the eyes, and an “Oh shit” of varying volume levels.
The weird thing was, I would have the same reaction. No matter how many times I watched it, in 2007 or 2018, there was a Pavlovian effect: a quickening of the pulse, combined with a quick-fire intellectual engagement with the Coens and cinematographer Roger Deakins’s visual artistry.
Trailers have been around since at least 1913, and there have been various high-water marks for them over the past hundred-plus years. In the early ’60s, Stanley Kubrick asked how they ever made a movie of Lolita. Alfred Hitchcock gave a guided tour of a quiet little motel that became the scene of a crime. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Jaws (1975), and Alien (1979) have promos so terrifying it’s a miracle anyone actually paid to go to those movies (Ridley Scott’s space-horror masterpiece has left its xenomorph DNA all over modern trailers). As the home entertainment era rolled around, trailers were attached to the beginning of VHS presentations of movies and were to be fast-forwarded past, without question. They were annoyances, not hype machines, and they certainly weren’t disruptively tidy pieces of art like they are today. More often than not, trailers were either a mashed-together collection of moments from the movie, seemingly without much thought given to pacing and tone, or they were laden with voice-over—“In a world …”—that talked over whatever nuance might be found within.
The first time I remember a legitimate grab-your-seat-neighbor’s-arm excitement from a trailer was for Pulp Fiction, but that had as much to do with what an obvious cinematic big bang that movie would be for my generation as it did the trailer itself. There were great ’90s trailers—Malcolm X, Boogie Nights, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Independence Day, and on and on—but they were still consigned to VHS, DVD, or the moments before feature presentations would begin in theaters. There was just no way to share them.
That all changed in the mid-2000s. YouTube officially launched at the end of 2005, and by the middle of 2006 I was spending most of my free time there, watching famous soccer goals, Roy Hobbs’s last home run in The Natural, skateboarding compilations, tutorials on how to assemble Ikea furniture, and the CNN story about Jason McElwain’s six-3-pointer game. There was a tremendous amount of time being spent on the platform, and there was already a tremendous amount of interest in movies. The audience was already there for trailers, all the film industry had to do was optimize them.
That’s exactly what it did. Aided by social media and movie-centric daily websites, the dam broke. I think you could make an argument that more words are spent these days analyzing trailers online than actual movies. After all, anyone can watch a trailer (for free!) and it only takes a few moments. A movie is a commitment, it requires memory and thought. Trailers are both instantly gratifying and reusable. Bite-size and worthy of scrutiny, they are the perfect modern-media predator preying on our digitally altered attention spans.
This is a bracket to decide the best trailer since 1990. We settled on nearly 30 years ago because there were some titles going back that far that warranted inclusion, but the cutoff could have easily been 2005. It’s right then that you see filmmakers and studios start to use trailers not just as an enticement to see the movie, but as a little movie unto itself, often with as much power as (if not more power than) the product being advertised. What you see, time and again, from trailers of the post-’05 period is a desire not just to sell you on a collection of actors or a tidy synopsis of a narrative. Instead, trailers function as a high-performing emotion-elicitation program. It’s not just what the movie is about or who appears in it. It’s how this movie will make you feel. And the best of them can trigger that emotion, over and over again.
And that’s why the trailers are so damn good, if a little scary. (It’s a little disturbing how easily and repeatedly trailers can manipulate your emotions, isn’t it?) And that’s why we easily could have made this bracket of 32 a bracket of 64 or 128 movies, and we would probably still have deep cuts to choose from the Christopher Nolan and David Fincher back catalog. We tried to be fair and not overrepresent the work of any one filmmaker, which is why the second-best trailer of 2007, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, is nowhere to be found in this bracket (I wouldn’t want to face it in a play-in, if there was one). Anderson is one of the filmmakers who uses trailers as a mini-canvas for his films, cutting his own spots and sometimes employing footage that won’t be seen in the theatrical release. There is no better evidence of the superiority of contemporary film trailers than how seriously the best working director takes them.
A few words on the methodology used here. I will admit to tipping the scales at certain points in this process, and I think that’s fine. I’m addicted to trailers, this can be my A Million Little Pieces. I cannot emphasize enough that this is not a referendum on what is the best movie, or the most popular trailer, or the trailer for the best or most popular movie. We really did try to zero in on the unofficial artistry and craft of movie trailers in and of themselves, though obviously the relative quality of the films they were promoting had a role in the thinking.
We tried to span genre and style, though I definitely have a type: a moody, preferably dirge-like opening, leading to a cathartic breakthrough, soundtracked either by an interstellar car alarm, a hundred trumpets blaring at once backward, or Rihanna. Ideally trailers should be gorgeous, support scholarship, have an arc, and leave you wanting more. And if they’re really clever, the “more” is just watching the trailer again.
Of course, life isn’t all Sour Patch Kids and smashing the replay button. We can’t have nice things, and that’s why just two years ago I wrote a post called “Stop Watching Movie Trailers.” Hollywood realized what a captive audience they had on their hands, and with the rise of superhero movies (since 2008’s Iron Man and The Dark Knight), we have seen the trailer market flooded. It’s routine to see multiple, ever-expanding takes on trailers, from the teaser to the “final” trailer. Red band trailers cannibalize the biggest laughs in our dirtiest comedies, and comic book movies drop Easter eggs all over the lawn, and we snatch them up. Blogs do freeze-frame analyses of minor Marvel efforts, and movies like Game Night and Blockers kill the thrill by stepping on their own jokes. It is what it is: For every Widows, there’s going to be a third Ant-Man and the Wasp clip that makes totally sure that we know Paul Rudd is small, but also big.
But there’s still gold in them hills. It was just a little more than a year ago, sitting in the Ringer offices, when the flourescent lights of the Black Panther teaser flickered on.
This time, the evangelizing happened on Slack, not through email or by bursting into someone’s office. And Twitter and Disney made sure no sentient human could possibly go 48 hours without hitting “Like” and “Subscribe.” But the feeling was still there. The eyes were still wide. And everyone, in their own way, said the same thing to themselves.
“Oh shit.”
The Field
Note: The bracket format has been updated since its original publication. For a breakdown of first-round voting and a look at the second-round matchups, click here. Second-round voting and a preview of the Elite Eight matchups are here.
Region 1
(1) The Social Network vs. (8) The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (teaser)
Fincher’s choice. The Social Network is the Duke of this whole thing. There was not a lot of debate as to what the no. 1 overall seed would be. The Social Network might be the best movie of the century, but it is certainly the best trailer, in our opinion. The use of a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” by a Belgian girls choir seemed revolutionary at the time—this was before every movie that wanted prestige points would play the same trick—and it might be the most tender moment of anything related to this movie about ambition, greed, and betrayal. It was also ballsy: nearly a minute of promotional time dedicated to all the lonely people whose lives would be impacted by the actions of the film’s characters. To advance out of the first round, The Social Network will have to defeat the Ritalin bump that is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo teaser.
(2) Cloverfield (teaser) vs. (7) Pineapple Express
The mystery box vs. the hot box. Cloverfield’s teaser was attached to the first Transformers movie in the summer of 2007 without a title, just an all-too-familiar normal-life-is-over atmosphere that reminded more than a few people of 9/11. It still goes hard, but is also important as a relic from a time when viral marketing did not make everyone who came in contact with it sick.
Pineapple Express’s trailer is twice as enjoyable as actually watching Pineapple Express, and the M.I.A. drop is an all-time use of music in a spot.
(3) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (teaser) vs. (6) Independence Day (teaser)
Let them fight. These are two ’90s sci-fi/action blockbusters that could frankly be released today with some minor special effects upgrades. Arnold and Will still radiate with nuclear-grade star power. These trailers are remarkable for what they don’t have: namely nuts-and-bolts plot. All you learn from Terminator 2 is … he’s back. And all you learn from Independence Day is that the planet had a really rough early July. That was enough. More movies today could do this little to sell their wares.
(4) Godzilla (teaser) vs. (5) Guardians of the Galaxy
It was really hard to choose between the teaser of Godzilla and the first full trailer, the latter of which features Bryan Cranston’s Black Forest ham–winning monologue about being sent back to the Stone Age.
But in the end, we had to go with the more understated pep talk from David Strathairn and the avant-garde halo jump, soundtracked by György Ligeti’s “Requiem.” There may not be a more haunting, beautiful shot in the entire IP Era of movies (so, the past 11 years, but especially the past five or six).
The Godzilla trailer felt different, and so did the Guardians of the Galaxy teaser. Marvel had already been enjoying more than half a decade from the top of the mountain, but Guardians showed that they could introduce characters that a majority of filmgoers had never even heard of, and they had perfected and evolved a winking, self-aware sense of humor to combine with the earnestness and action found in previous efforts like Captain America: The First Avenger.
Region 2
(1) Kill Bill: Vol. 1 vs. (8) Creed
Kill Bill was Tarantino’s fourth movie, and his most daring effort to date—a two-volume spaghetti martial-arts bloodfest and rumination of vengeance. When Lucy Liu flips her swords and “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” kicks in, you get about a minute of pop culture perfection. The Bride faces off against Michael B. Jordan and Philadelphia sports mythology. I have never seen a trailer silence doubters and convert new followers as quickly as the first promo for Creed. Sometimes I watch Jordan shadowbox the wall just to get mentally ready to, like, do a podcast. Fun fact: The slow-motion shot of Jordan running through South Philly predicted the Eagles winning the Super Bowl.
(2) The Master vs. (7) The Blair Witch Project
I would imagine someone, somewhere, has written a thesis paper on various trailers for The Master. This teaser makes the movie look like a twisted version of The Best Years of Our Lives. It doesn’t even feature a glimpse of Philip Seymour Hoffman or Amy Adams, or allude to the newfangled religion at the heart of the film. No matter. Anderson dropped The Master breadcrumbs in the lead up to the film’s theatrical release, and they are so artfully done, so deeply mysterious, that they must be considered not as promotion but as part of the movie itself.
(3) No Country for Old Men vs. (6) Where the Wild Things Are
I already wrote enough above about the No Country trailer, but I did just want to note how much screen time Woody Harrelson gets in the trailer in relation to the actual size of his role in the movie. Impressive for someone who apparently couldn’t remember his lines! “Compared to what? The bubonic plague?” forever though.
Spike Jonze consistently has some of the best trailers—he and Fincher both have backgrounds in advertising, which makes a lot of sense. Where the Wild Things Are is probably the most tearjerky clip in the bracket, which actually hurts its rewatchability, in my estimation. I can’t wait to see what it does against a captive bolt pistol.
(4) Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (teaser) vs. (5) The Wolf of Wall Street
The Rogue One teaser is my favorite ever Star Wars movie. Too bad they never actually made it. Every single shot in The Wolf of Wall Street is meme-worthy, and even though it was about drugged-up ’80s Wall Street shitlords, it was soundtracked by the just-released Kanye West anthem “Black Skinhead,” which helped make it feel of the moment (the fact Wall Street hadn’t really changed also helped).
Region 3
(1) Star Wars: The Force Awakens vs. (8) Boogie Nights
The Force Awakens trailer has been watched over 100 million times since it was released in October 2015. This is partly because the set pieces play way more intensely in the trailer than they do in the movie. It’s incredibly intense drama advertising a film that was at times nonsensical and silly. But there’s something deeper at work behind its seeding in this bracket. When Harrison Ford says, “It’s true … all of it,” it seemed to ratify almost 40 years of pent-up fan longing in a way that didn’t feel gross. Three years later, dudes on Twitter were trying to raise money to remake The Last Jedi. It says a lot about life on Earth that I am already nostalgic for the feeling of anticipation around Star Wars in the fall of 2015.
Speaking of nostalgia, Boogie Nights was a slow ride back to the ’70s. It’s a totally addled, jacked-up two-and-a-half minutes that is as much an advertisement for Anderson’s cinematic bravado as it is the cars, clothes, and sounds of the film itself.
(2) Magic Mike vs. (7) Frances Ha
Along with Pineapple Express, these two trailers have the two best song drops I’ve ever seen and heard. David Bowie’s “Modern Love” and Rihanna’s “We Found Love” take these two small movies about people trying to claw their way into adulthood and make them feel more epic than The Fellowship of the Ring. And when you think about it, that’s exactly how those songs work in everyday life, too: You put your ear buds in, and life, no matter how black and white, goes totally technicolor. What a trick.
(3) Black Panther (teaser) vs. (6) Little Children
The moment when Run the Jewels’ “Legend Has It” hits in the Black Panther trailer is the first time Marvel was actually cool. That alone would probably land this trailer in the bracket, but the movie’s high seeding is down to how ably it communicates not just the roles and broad-strokes plot of the movie, but the theme: It’s hard for a good man to be king.
Tell Patrick Wilson about it. Forget Wakanda, my guy was just trying to run the suburbs. Little Children has been largely forgotten, but this trailer is still a walking panic attack of middle-age anxiety and guilt. One of the hallmarks of post-’05 trailers is the way they are built around a single sound effect—whether it’s Inception’s bongs (or Sicario’s bongs), Hunger’s lone piano, or the train sounds of Todd Field’s Oscar-nominated drama.
(4) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford vs. (5) Skyfall
The Assassination of Jesse James is for me. I was by far the trailer’s most vocal supporter in the group debate about which ones to put in the field. This movie was a total flop at the box office, so I guess you could say the trailer didn’t work. Maybe that’s because it belongs in a museum, where it would play on a loop, 24 hours a day. What a sumptuous wonder this thing is. This is a movie that gives its story away in the title, so everything about it is sensory—the music, the cinematography, the languid tone of the performances. It’s all captured here, with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s haunting score playing over images of burning plains and snakes wrapping around the hands of outlaws.
Skyfall imagined James Bond as Christopher Nolan’s Bruce Wayne. At the end of the day, Sam Mendes made a Bond movie, with plenty of sex and death dodging. But it still reckons with the physical, psychological, emotional, and geopolitical toll of being a government assassin. The shot of Judi Dench’s M looking over coffins draped in flags is the most devastating Bond moment since the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Region 4
(1) Inception vs. (8) Fast & Furious 6
It should come as no surprise that the director of The Prestige is good at making trailers. We could have included The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, and Dunkirk in this bracket, but Inception gets special notice. When this came out on the heels of The Dark Knight, it was a warning shot: This guy is taking a leap. Nolan didn’t need Batman to make a big statement. Because he wasn’t working from preexisting intellectual property, Nolan had to reveal a little more to entice his audience. To that end, the exploding fruit stand, collapsing city blocks, and water flooding Saito’s home are all included. No matter: The deeper twists of the film were no less potent when people finally saw the movie in theaters.
We included Furious 6 because of the Michelle Rodriguez character reveal and also because we work for Bill Simmons.
(2) The Tree of Life vs. (7) Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace
Late-period Terrence Malick trailers have a higher approval rating than late-period Terrence Malick movies. The Tree of Life is about nature and grace and love and science and God, and the trailer—greatly aided by Bedrich Smetana’s gorgeous music—wraps all of it up into a digestible package and packs no less of an emotional impact. I look forward to seeing if it can topple Darth Maul’s double-edged light saber.
(3) Prometheus vs. (6) Gravity
Prometheus has the best audio mix of any trailer in this bracket—with dialogue, sound effects, concussively loud “music,” and what sounds like a dying robot screaming through a Marshall stack. Gravity is no less harrowing, but it is deceptively simple given the grandeur of what it’s showing us. Great trailers give us a crash course on the visual language of the movie, and in the Gravity spot the audience begins preparations for Alfonso Cuarón and Emmanuel Lubezki’s dizzying, vertiginous camerawork.
(4) Pulp Fiction vs. (5) Mad Max: Fury Road
Pulp Fiction is here because the Cannes brag into Dick Dale is blow-your-hair-back Maxell-ad good, but this is probably the tightest 4 vs. 5 battle in the bracket. We didn’t want to give into recency bias, so Fury Road is ranked lower, but my God, this trailer. It slyly sets up the world in a way the movie barely bothers to (“water wars”), and then proceeds to push all of its batshit-intense stunt-work chips into the middle of the table. And that’s before you even get to shaved-head Charlize screaming in the desert. If they had played “Jungle Boogie” over the images in this thing, it would have been the perfect beast.
An earlier version of this piece included the wrong trailer for Black Panther.
