Week 12: Chapter 2

The quote in the discussion section of the chapter sums up movie trailers in general: "The object of nearly every trailer is to get teenage boys' butts into seats...And that means going for as much violence and sex as you can jam into 2 1/2 minutes" (Streisand, 1999, p. 56).

In my observations, the trailers usually have all the sex and violence and sometimes it's the only sexual or violent scenes in the whole movie. With at least five movies coming out each weekend, movie producers have to make sure that people will chose their movies to watch by grabbing their attention with the trailers. Movie producers also make different versions of the movies to include different scenes or to try to appeal to different audiences.

I've noticed this with the "Sweeney Todd" trailers. The movie is coming out Christmas day, which is one of the biggest days for movies to come out, so it will be competing with other movies being released and those already in theaters. So far I've seen three different trailers to focus to three different audiences: female, male and musical fans. One of the first trailers showed mainly shots of Johnny Depp to grab the female fans of all things Johnny Depp. These shots included intense gazes and him looking hot to attract the female audience that may have no idea about the story or musical of "Sweeney Todd." Another trailer shows the violence of Sweeney Todd and how he murders people for revenge to attract the male audience. The final trailer includes more singing and songs to attract the musical theater fans. Many of them were nervous for this movie because Stephen Sondheim is one of the composers who create very hard musicals to sing and Johnny Depp had constantly said he could never sing. With these trailers, the musical theater fans can see that he and the other actors could sing and that Tim Burton was taking an interesting approach to the musical.

Trailers will continue to cram as much violence and sex to grab people's attention to come back to the movie theaters for their movie. They will also have different trailers to appeal to all audiences.