Trailers for trailers? Movie studios in the TikTok era are competing for 1 second of your precious attention

Trailers of two of Hollywood’s most anticipated upcoming movies came out this week. Warner Bros. Discovery’s Dune: Part Three and Marvel Studios’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day premiered a day apart. 

But what’s most interesting is the marketing strategy behind the trailers—in which promos and short clips of the trailers were released ahead of the full trailers. 

On Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery hosted a livestreamed event on the official Dune account on TikTok.

It featured director Dennis Villeneuve and some of the cast talking about the upcoming movie to a live audience before airing the trailer, which was simultaneously revealed at the end of the stream before being rolled out on other platforms like Instagram and YouTube. 

Videos with the star-studded cast—including Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Javier Bardem—urging fans to watch the trailer circulated online, and were later shared from the Warner Bros. Discovery and IMAX social accounts.  

Meanwhile, Marvel Studios released the official trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day on Wednesday.

But the day before, Tom Holland announced on Instagram that he and the studio were “doing something that has never been done before” and that “some of our greatest fans are going to help us release pieces of” the trailer.

Holland tagged an Instagram account of a fan in Peru, who shared a two-second clip from the trailer featuring Spider-Man swinging through the air holding someone. That fan then tagged another fan in Ohio, who shared a separate bite-sized clip from the trailer. 

Throughout the day, fans from different parts of the world tagged each other, showing different seconds-long clips before the full trailer debuted the next day. 

This isn’t the first time that Marvel Studios has released its trailers in a non-traditional way.

In December, the studio premiered four different trailers for Avengers: Doomsday during theatrical showings of Avatar: Fire and Ash. It was the only way that fans could access the trailers immediately, since they weren’t officially released online until a few days later. 

Short cuts

Trailers have historically served as a marketing tool for films, but sharing microclips from trailers to get fans excited about trailers themselves seems to be a new marketing trend all on its own. 

It’s certainly a sign of the times, especially as short-form content and microdramas become even more popular while the attention spans of a generation weaned on TikTok get shorter. 

But it’s also indicative of the fluctuating nature of the theatrical business. 

While box office numbers have gone up since the pandemic, they have not reached pre-pandemic levels.

The North American box office grossed $9 billion last year, which is above the numbers of 2020, but still low compared to the years prior.

Marvel movies also continue to see a downturn at the box office, while AMC Theatres recently announced its plans to shut down several “underperforming” locations across the United States after a decline in attendance. 

Networks and streaming services have already played around with releasing bite-sized clips of its shows on social media to get users to watch full seasons of its shows. 

The movie industry, meanwhile, has long accepted that it needs social media to promote its new movies, whether that means hiring TikTok creators to make fan trailers or creating viral moments to grab attention. 

But as studios and theater chains desperately try to reach young fans on social media, generating more hype around movie trailers might be the next thing they’re experimenting with to actually get audiences into theaters.

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