From the guys who brought you Best of the Worst, Half in the Bag, and those really long Star Wars reviews comes a video that proves all new movie trailers to be the same.
The roughly eight-minute super-cut from Red Letter Media includes examples from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Green Lantern, The Avengers, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Man of Steel, Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and that’s a very condensed list.
The editing formula is as follows:
1. Establishing Shot of the City
2. BWAAAAAAM!!!
3. Mysterious, Cryptic, and Vague Lines
4. Make Your Characters Look Cool
5. Build Up to Silence
6. Action Montage! (Don’t Forget the Powerful and/or Inspiring Dialogue)
7. End Montage with Another Hard Cut to Quiet
8. Eh, Throw a Laser Shooting Into the Sky. Why Not?
9. Title
10. Clever and/or Funny End Tag Before Release Date
Some of these tropes are unavoidable when editing together a movie trailer, especially an action blockbuster. Montages are the quickest way to show a lot of characters and set pieces in a short amount of time, and of course, the editors want to give the heroes a moment to look really cool.
Other parts reveal how formulaic some of these movies are, like the laser shooting into the sky. There are a whole lot of movies with a laser shooting out of a big city like New York or Chicago. Why are laser-city shots so popular, beyond a simple lack of original ideas? Also, the Inception “BWAAAAAAM!!!” is done. It’s finished. Find a new gimmick.
Source: Red Letter Media via Devour
