Regal Cinemas lets red-band trailers back into theaters

Posted by Chris

March 18, 2008

Red-band, restricted trailers have become all the rage online, especially for either comedies that sport crude humor or violent movies with high body counts. That’s in large part because the Internet allows for age verification that insures the trailer isn’t falling into the wrong hands, at least for the 15 minutes before it’s ripped and put on YouTube for everyone to see.

But they’ve still been almost completely absent from theaters, where it can’t be guaranteed that everyone is over 18 and the physical process of adding a trailer to a reel of film doesn’t allow for easy swapping in and out.

But now Regal Cinemas has announced it will be bringing red-band trailers back to its 6,300+ screens nationwide. The chain has experimented with red-band trailers at select art-house screens but this would mark a major re-entry into running restricted spots.

It’s digital technology that’s powering the comeback. Red-band trailers can now be added to or stripped from specific screens at will and as the movie it’s appearing before dictates.

Studios are eager to get restricted trailers back into theaters since, as they’ve found with their distribution online, they do a far better job of selling the movie to the intended audience than watered-down green-band all-ages trailers.

I think this is a fantastic move. And it will continue to be right up until the moment a parent complains to the FTC that her 14 year-old saw a trailer with a graphic sex scene in it when he sneaked into a screening of Saw 5. At which point the world will cease to exist for all the uproar that will result.

But in the meantime anything that enables movie studios to more accurately sell their movie to their target audience is a good thing. And anything that brings wider distribution (outside of the aforementioned YouTube ripping) to these trailers, some of which are quite good, is a plus.