"The Batman" and the Problem with Movie Trailers
In a perfect world I would be telling you before you even start reading this that it contains spoilers for The Batman (2022). But if this were a perfect world, I wouldn’t be writing this, and, unfortunately, even if you haven’t seen the movie, you’ve already seen everything I’m about to talk about.
In a time when people are going to movie theaters less than ever due to the effects of COVID and the rise of streamers, not only are box office numbers down, but so are great theater moments.
Over the last five years or so, there’ve only been a handful of times that I’ve been in a theater and the audience has had a true collective interaction, the type of moment that is really what separates watching something at home by yourself or with a couple friends from seeing it in a packed theater. The thing about these moments is that they seem to come from only two sources: really good horror movies, and Marvel movies. Get Out (2017) and A Quiet Place (2018) come to mind. The collective cries both internal and in the form of screams at full volume for Chris to not open that little door in Rose’s room in Get Out, and the way that at many times during A Quiet Place the audience, in unison, stopped munching popcorn and ended up participating in the silence and terror with the characters on-screen, these are the things that make the theater experience so great. We’ve seen it in the Marvel films in the form of its own fan-service, especially in Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Spiderman: No Way Home (2021), where even if you don’t know the backstory to why everyone is losing their minds hollering, cheering, and applauding, at Captain America catching Thor’s hammer, or seeing Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire emerge from portals, that environment and energy still can elevate your experience and make it a memorable one.
Not only are these moments visceral and exciting, they also share one very important characteristic… they’re not in the fucking trailer! And that’s what brings us to The Batman.
Friday night. Los Angeles. Opening weekend for The Batman, the most anticipated movie of the year. A sold out, four-hundred and fifty eight seat theater. The lights go down, “Ave Maria” begins to play and, and a title card reading “The Batman” flashes on the screen. Applause! and Cheers! ring out through the theater. That applause is something that we don’t see much at movies these days. It’s refreshing, it’s exciting.
The beautifully simplistic opening sequence begins, the audience unsure if they're seeing through Batman’s eyes or the Riddler’s. Soon, however, it’s clear we’re with the Riddler, and as we get our first glance of him, a flash in the shadows of the mayor’s apartment– four-hundred and fifty eight people gasp! Together. At the exact same time. That’s how you open a movie. And that’s why you go to the theater. But here’s the problem; nothing like that ever happened again.
Now, that’s not because it didn’t have moments worthy of it, it actually had two or three more, it’s because we’d already seen those moments in the trailer. Not only did we see them in the trailer, they’re the moments from the trailer that stuck in our minds the best.
Warner Bros. released three trailers for The Batman along with a TV spot that advertised one of those trailers. On just Warner Bros. YouTube channel alone (not of its affiliates, or of channels that also release the studio-approved trailers) those trailers have between 27 million and 45 million views (as of opening weekend). Add that to the official TV spot, the times any of the trailers may have played on TV, and times when its trailers have played in movie theaters, plus all of the additional views from other channels on YouTube, its safe to say that anyone interested in seeing The Batman has probably seen at least one trailer and has probably seen at least two of them multiple times.
Those numbers are great, they helped get people to theaters, and lead to Warner Bros.’ pandemic best opening weekend, and the second best opening weekend of the pandemic era overall. But at what cost to the experience of the film itself?
There are two or three moments that should have brought the house down (and one that should’ve been maybe just short of that, but its a cut below the other two) that were… good. They were cool. But we’d seen them in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE TRAILERS ALREADY!
When Batman drops into a dark hallway, all we can see is that it’s a hallway, there’s too much darkness in the distance to see how long or who’s there. Then we hear combat sounds, then the gunfire of automatic rifles, their flashbangs giving off the only light we see in the scene. It’s stylized, inventive, brutal, emphatic, and marks the beginning of a descent into a new portion of the story, but the one thing it was missing was that it wasn’t surprising. All four hundred and fifty eight people had seen that scene over and over. That scene should have been an absolute show-stopper, and how did the audience react? They munched their popcorn and kept watching the movie. “Sure, it’s cool, but we’ve been seeing it for the past six months.”
When we hear that the Riddler may have fled to a nearby diner, we’re then met with a beautiful shot of a “Nighthawks”-inspired exterior clouded by rainfall, and the blur of a man slouched at the counter behind a fogged window. This should be the most suspenseful moment in the film, the first confrontation with the villain. The audience should be frozen on the edge of their seats, but instead they’re met with inevitability. This is the first piece of The Batman they ever saw once the film was actually finished production, and man was it exciting to see back in October of 2021. So instead of people leaning in in silence, or gasping at the reveal of Paul Dano not in his Riddler garb for the very first time, and the question mark in his coffee, there were whispers. “Oh, it's that scene.” “It’s where they catch him.” “It’s the diner.” What the fuck!? Is that what you want Warner Bros.? Is that what Matt Reeves wants the audience to feel in that scene? We already know what happens. It should be one of the best scenes in the movie, but you ripped any ounce of suspense from it because you kept saying, “Hey look at this! See this guy, he’s the Riddler. And look, the cops catch him. And see, we know he’s the Riddler because of his coffee. And does he put up a struggle? Do him and Batman face off here? Of course not, we already told you that he gives himself up to the police.” Now if you can subvert what we were shown in the trailers, that can work, but they basically just took a couple shots out of the scene and put the rest of it in the trailer.
The last moment I’ll mention is at the climax of the film. When we’re in Gotham Square Garden as the city and the arena are flooding, Batman appears through smoke and takes out a whole squad of bad guys. After taking out the final one, his back is to the camera, the camera pushes in to him and once he gives us a look over his shoulder it holds for a moment. This shot is screaming, “I’m Batman! This is the climax! Time to get geared up! Let’s go!” The camera move, the moment, and the image itself are very similar to that of when Captain America catches Thor’s hammer. That Avengers: Endgame moment was maybe the craziest I’ve ever seen a movie theater, and you can see countless videos of theater reactions to it all over the internet. So what happened when that same visual cue came up at the same point in the story in The Batman? Nothing happened. The movie kept playing and people continued to sip their sodas and pucker from their sour patch watermelons just like they had for the last two hours, because every ad for The Batman they’ve seen since December ended with that scene. They’ve already watched it twenty times before they ever saw the actual film.
Trailers themselves are their own type of art form; I’ve even been disappointed by movies because the trailer was incredible and the movie was fine. They’re designed to make you want to go see the film, but lately they feel more like a summary. We tend to judge comedies like this, “Well, it was solid, but they used all the best jokes in the trailer”. The job of the trailer is to intrigue us, give us a sense of the story, the characters, the world; not to be a highlight reel. The first full The Batman trailer from October that opens with the Riddler being caught is an incredible trailer, but it hurts the experience of the film because it uses too many of it’s best moments (I didn’t even talk about the batmobile chase with Penguin, but that’s because they only put it in the one trailer). Are we just trying to sell tickets, or deliver the best experience we can? There’s a way to do both, we just don’t see it often enough.
The first time I remember an audience going wild in a movie theater was when my parents took me to Rambo (2008). I was 12 (the price of a movie ticket is cheaper than the price of a babysitter). I’d never seen a Rambo movie. John Rambo kills a lot of people, in a lot of different ways, some creative, some just straight brutal. And do you know what happened every time Rambo killed someone? The entire theater erupted in triumphant shouts, hollers, and applause. I don’t really remember anything about the movie, the plot, the setting, any character other than Rambo, but I remember that it was exciting, fun, and that that audience was having an absolute blast together. And do you know how many of those kills are in the trailer? One. Now tell me how it makes sense that a really good film about maybe the most beloved superhero of all time, the most anticipated movie of the year, in an era where superhero movies have never been more popular can create moments more thrilling and imaginative than those of a forgettable attempted reboot of a franchise that hadn’t been around for 20 years, but can’t garner reactions from the audience anywhere close to that unmemorable reboot.