'Skyfall' introduces the world to the 'super trailer'
Posted Monday, May 21, 2012 at 1:15 PM Central
by John Couture
Last night, Sony debuted the first teaser trailer for the latest James Bond installment Skyfall. I would love to sit here and talk about the grittiness that filmmakers have chosen to add to this classic character, but instead we are talking about something called a "super trailer."
Fads in movie trailers aren't new. With the proliferation of technology, it seems that everyone wants to improve upon the tried and true method of hyping upcoming movies. I'm sure you all remember those "interactive trailers" that were the next big thing a couple of years ago.
Well, it seems that the next step in the evolution of the movie trailer is the "super trailer." So, what's so super about it? That's a good question because while Sony coined the term, it just looks two trailers (one for the movie and one for a movie game) spliced into one long trailer.
Perhaps "combo trailer" would have been a more accurate descriptor, but I digress. The first half of the super trailer is the first look at Skyfall, while the second half of the trailer is a commercial for a James Bond themed video game called 007 Legends.
While sure the super trailer is a double score for a small population that likes both James Bond movies and plays video games, I tend to think that James Bond fans skew older. And we all know that serious gamers are more represented in the younger demos.
And who knows, maybe this super trailer is some sort of brilliant plan by a marketing genius to expand the two audiences and increase the overlap. Personally, I don't buy it. Instead, I see a bloated trailer that will struggle to get people to dedicate an entire three minutes of their time to it.
In Internet terms, three minutes is a lifetime. Sony may have been better served to simply create two trailers and market them to their respective audiences. I guess we will have to just wait and see what happens.
Regardless, I doubt this is the last "super trailer" that we see. With just about every movie being licensed into a video game these days, it's a safe bet that another studio or two will gladly follow Sony's lead.
As for the movie trailer itself, I do like what I see in it. It seems that this film continues the trend that they have started since Daniel Craig took over the James Bond character. They have focused more and more on his ruthless espionage work and less on his playboy subplots and it has created a grittier film that more resembles the Bourne movies than older classic James Bond fare.
What do you think of the new trailer concept and the first look at Skyfall? Skyfall hits theaters on November 9.