History of Film Trailers

Trailers or Previews are advertisements of feature films that will be exhibited in the future at cinemas.

The term trailer comes from the advertisement been after a film programme. This was changed because the viewers of the film used to leave as soon as it finished and didn’t want to watch the trailer.

Besides at the beginning of cinema films, film trailers are one of the most popular things watched on the internet. Over 10 billion film trailers are watched on the internet annually, ranking them third after news and user-created video.

The first trailer shown in the US was in 1913 when the advertiser for the Marcus Loew Theatre chain produced a short promotional film for the play ‘The Pleasure Seekers'. Granlund, who created this promotional film, was also the first person to create a trailer for a motion picture as well. This was to promote the new film featuring Charlie Chaplin in 1914.

Most trailers in them times had much narrative in them, and those that did had stentorian voices in them.

In the early 1960’s, the face of motion picture trailers changed. Textless, montages and quick editing became popular as the new trailers. Stanley Kubrick was among the trend setters at this time, producing the trailers for such films as Lolita and Dr. Strangelove. Due to this new change in trailer features, they became popular on television as well.

Kaleidoscope Films was opened in 1968 by Kuehn and his company, who became a major player in the industry. As Hollywood began to make bigger blockbuster films, people were beginning to invest more money in marketing.

In earlier decades of cinema, trailers were only one part of the entertainment which included cartoon shorts and serial adventure episodes. Trailers nowadays are much more detailed and longer, including clips from the film.

Brief

A promotional package for a new film, to include a teaser trailer, together with two of the following three options:

-a website homepage for the film;

-a film magazine front cover, featuring the film;

-a poster for the film.