Pros and cons of the R-rated trailers movement
My latest op-ed piece is up at Brandweek. This time around I’m talking about how R-rated trailers - the red-band versions that are all the rage in the last couple years - are an important tool studios can now utilize. I say now because, since theaters almost uniformly won’t run them, it’s really the Internet that has let studios play around with the idea.
Opinion: Why Raunchy Movie Trailers Are Effective
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NEW YORK — If you go to the movies in time to catch the trailers (so-called because they used to appear after the feature, not before) you’ll notice each one starts with a green card that informs you the preview has been rated G or PG for all audiences. Most of the trailers you might watch on the Internet carry the same prelude. The MPAA reviews and assigns ratings to all trailers, just like it does for full-length movies.
But there’ve been a wave of trailers appearing on the Internet in the last year or two that are preceded by a red-band warning that the preview you’re about to watch has been rated R. These trailers, like the movies they’re promoting, feature a few more cuss words, a bit more sex and usually quite a bit more violence. They are, by most measures, more accurate representations of the movie they’re promoting than if a green-band trailer had been created. (For another viewpoint on movie trailers and their audience, see Becky Ebenkamp’s “The Biz” column on the same subject from Brandweek’s Aug. 6 issue, Here.)
The red-band movement is one that has been made possible almost solely by the Internet. Most theater chains won’t show those sorts of trailers because they’ve been deemed inappropriate for mass consumption, especially when there’s the possibility someone who’s under 17 might see it. Online, these trailers are often hosted on the movie’s official site and require the viewer to input his or her name, birthdate and ZIP code, all of which is matched against some sort of database that verifies you are who you say you are.
Looking at the resurgence of these trailers, you would see they’ve followed closely behind the new wave of R-rated comedies that has come ashore since, essentially, 2005’s Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson film Wedding Crashers.
These R-rated trailers do something that their PG-rated brethren couldn’t really do: Accurately sell the movie to its intended audience. Trailer creators previously were required to water down a movie in order to sell it, something that necessarily misrepresents a movie. Consider a sex comedy whose trailer contains no sex to have committed a sin—they’ve lied by omission. So it’s a good thing for the audience that they can now get a clearer picture of the movie by seeing that it does include someone getting stabbed in the eye or a character getting lucky.
Studios, I imagine, are also loving the red-band era. Each R-rated trailer they release becomes a hot topic in the film blog world, the online equivalent of someone who sneaks a Playboy into junior high homeroom. It’s considered something that’s forbidden fruit, with some folks posting lengthy essays on how to bypass the age verification, as if this were content that was being wrongly suppressed. But I would no sooner show someone underage how to view one than I would sneak someone underage into the movie itself.
The creation of R-rated trailers is a great thing for the audience and a sure-fire (for now) buzz-creation tactic for the studios. The increasing amount of adult comedies, films with humor and situations that are only appropriate for adult audiences, owe much of their success to the freedom the Internet allows in distributing trailers that show exactly what those audiences can expect. That’s always a good thing.
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