In May, I fulfilled a lifelong dream by attending the Cannes Film Festival. One of the joys of beꦕing there was seeing films completely cold. It was a welcome respite from the publicity frenzy movie fans are usually subjected to – the barrage of trailers, trailers-for-trailers, stills, first-look featurettes and ‘exclusive’ (yet somehow ubiquitous) internet-clogging clips.

Once, the only persuasion audiences needed to see a movie was a close-up of the stars and captions informing you that (in Casablanca, for example) “ever🍎y burning moment brings a new danger!” Audiences got wise; movie marketers got wiser. Trailer design peaked in the ‘90s with inventive teasers for the likes of Godzilla (1998) that were frequently better than the movies they advertised.

And then the internet ruined things. In our content-overloaded culture, social media gives studios the means to bludgeon audiences through pre-release saturation. In 2012, a fan named Sleepyskunk created a 25-minute cut of The Amazing Spider-Man from the sheer volume of footage released by Sony. Remarkably, the result wasn't far off the mark. Trailer grammar is so 🤪familiar we can pretty much guess the story, beat by beat.

We’re all complicit, picking over potential clues in every marketing morsel. Our social feeds are clogged with comments, complaints, second guesses. Critical discourse gets shut down, because we’re juඣdging the book by its cover. We congratulate ourselves when we hypothesise the identity of Obenhauser in SPECTRE and then moan on release that it was too obvious. 

Is it just me, or is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull underrated?

Is it just me, or should actors not bother with accents?

Is it just me, or is An Unexpected Journey the best Middle-earth movie?