Movies: Hey, Marketers: STOP. SPOILING. FILMS. IN. THE. TRAILERS.

Not even the terminator can save you from spoilers in trailers. Well...
he probably could but it wouldn't be pretty. 

Any cinema staff member wandering the long hallways of any given cinema would have found someone looking suspiciously like me outside a screen entrance in Cineworld Braintree at some point; standing there eating ice cream, or drinking a milkshake. Waiting for something, but what? Does he like the smell of the popcorn? Is there something in that nearby bin he wants? Is he gathering the guts to ask out that girl who is several leagues above? 

Well, it was more about waiting for the trailers to end, waiting for roughly 25 minutes until the staple 'before movie' advert that Cineworld likes to do for its lovely unlimited card. Because as much as I love watching movies in the surround of the cinema, I hate movie trailers equally. There is no worse first world problem then movie trailers right now. Not, a, one.

(Note: Exaggeration. But...)

The recent Terminator: Genisys was just a notable highlighting; one that I got to see first hand. It's an amusing twist of irony that one of the few times I actually sat and watched trailers, Genisys came up and proved fundamentally that trailers are a toxin to those that love to actually go to the cinema regularly; spoiling almost every single notable moment in the film as confirmed by Chris Stuckmann in his review.  Including one thunderously huge twist, which I won't talk about here because who are

we kidding, you already know it thanks to the overly generous trailer.

Seriously. Something like this would
have been more then enough.

As probably demonstrated by the opening paragraph, this is nothing new, not really. Our marketing overlords decided to reveal a big spoiler in the trailer of How To Train Your Dragon 2, and taint my view of the film in the process. This is what encouraged the waiting game mentioned earlier (Happy Ending: really enjoyed HTTYD 2 second time around). To haphazardly jump back to more recent times, I covered and scrunched my ears when I had to sit through the Jurassic World trailer. But those little details still get through, those little details that you don't want to know really, if you are like me and want to go in without certainty, without an idea of the movies path. This is the kind of thing incidentally, that pushed me instinctively away from The Theory Of Everything, the Stephen Hawking biopic for which the trailer added to the things I already knew about the scientists with things I didn't know from the movie; including much of the plot arc. 

I get the problem of course; it's not just about me, it is about casual movie goers who want a flavour of what the movie is like. Transformers: Age Of Extinction is a good example. The trailers had robot dinosaurs from the later stages in it but I didn't mind at the time. It was the kick that got me to go and see the film. Transformers is a simple pleasure for me; a film that I didn't particularly mind seeing a bunch of first because none of it was particularly spoiler-tastic; it was a film about fighting robots and that it roughly what the trailer reveals. 

It was not the trailers that inspired fan art for Fight Club.

But then to roar right back to Terminator Genisys, the spoilerlicious trailers gave the film a negative aura before the film was even in sight of release. Possibly the last film in the franchise (I have managed to avoid enough details to avoid knowing that), possibly the concluding chapter and they spoil some of the biggest twists? Even to a casual movie goer that is dumb, premature ejaculation that would get any poor guy (or woman) laughed out of the bed. And it is almost an epidemic. Movie trailers feel the need to at least explain the entire of the first act in their films these days, and it is such a turn off. I don't want to see the movie with a killer twist spoiled in the trailer; I want to see it actually happen. Fight Club, for example, is not one of my favourite films because I needed the trailer to do a highlights package for me first. I did not buy it some 12 years after release because I saw the updated 2006 trailer tell me that- *CENSORED BY MOVIE DECENCY*. I saw the film for that and I loved it. 

Which brings me onto the actual, money making side of the game when it comes to films. I don't know if people have discovered that marketing in that these newly extended trailers actually bring in more people, or if they've discovered that making these longer, spoilerific trailers encourages moviegoers to avoid them, and thus buy more ice cream. Neither makes a particular amount of sense, although the second is more delicious. If anything trailers like these turn me off seeing the latest Terminator, in spite of the good reviews it has had from some crowds. I would rather see the interesting Holmes, which I know little about then the Terminator film; the trailers have firmly picked the balloon of my enthusiasm and then continues chopping at the remains. 

Awesome. 

I'm just saying guys, sneak previews would do fine. Why not thirty second previews? Cloverfield, from way back in the days of 2009, made an amazing minute long trailer where the Statue Of Liberty's head was ripped off and rolled through the streets; and that was the end of the trailer. Nothing else needed. Big horrible monster, New York, first person. Count me in. Less really can be more. Cliffhangers aren't exactly the icing on the cake of many movies, but in trailers they should be; people should be given a taste of the movie cake and be left begging for more. They should not be having it smeared so hard in their face that they get diabetes.