20 Movie Trailers With Footage Shot Just For the Trailer

The #1 complaint about movie trailers: They give away too much. No one wants to feel like they paid $20 to see a longer version of something they’ve already watched. But then the question becomes how do you convince someone to see a film without spoiling all the of the best parts?Over the years, Hollywood developed one foolproof solution to this problem: Trailers comprised of footage that was never intended to appear in the final film anyway. It doesn’t happen often; shooting additional material exclusively for a trailer is an unnecessary (and sometimes very pricy) expense. That might be why these sorts of trailers tend to be among my favorites. They’re unusual, and way more creative than the typical 2.5 minutes of highlights.To see what I mean, watch the 20 trailers below, all of which contain scenes that were never intended to appear in the film they were created to promote. Bear in mind, this is not a list of trailers with scenes that didn’t make the final cut of their movie because of reshoots. Those are cases where plans changed during production (like the Rogue One trailers that bear almost no resemblance to the movie). The trailers below are all very deliberate, very skillful acts of canny marketing.Alien (1979)This early teaser for Ridley Scott’s Alien features the movie’s iconic title design by R/Greenberg Associates, where the word “ALIEN” slowly emerges out of a seemingly random pattern of disconnected lines. That does appear in the film, but in this early trailer, they play over footage of a craggy alien world, and an egg that slowly cracks open — both of which look nothing like the versions that appear in the final film. Thankfully, the marketers already had that great tagline to rely on: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”Johnny Dangerously (1984)There is a long tradition of teaser trailers in which recognizable actors break the fourth wall and speak directly to the camera as part of a sales pitch to potential customers. In this clip for the gangster spoof Johnny Dangerously, Joe Piscopo — identified as that guy “from Saturday Night Live” — assaults a projectionist so he can show an ad for his new movie while he comments on the action in character as Danny Vermin. (“He looks like Michael Keaton to me!” Joe/Danny says after his co-star appears on screen.) It’s clever, or maybe too clever; Johnny Dangerously grossed less than $18 million in theaters in the winter of 1984 and ’85.Back to the Future (1985)Here’s another trailer with a fourth-wall-breaking movie star. Michael J. Fox looks directly into the lens and answers a question from an off-camera voice about how far he’s going back. “About 30 years,” he replies with a coy eyebrow raise. Huey Lewis’ famous “Back in Time” song is already present, but it’s interesting to note how the clip doesn’t include a single wide shot of the time machine — and when Marty zooms off into the past, you only see the fiery streaks left on the road, not the DeLorean itself. They left that for future ads to reveal.READ MORE: 20 Bad Trailers For Great MoviesRocky IV (1985)The film is called Rocky IV, but by the fourth film, audiences were very familiar with the Italian Stallion. Instead, this early teaser focused on his new opponent, with newcomer Dolph Lundgren speaking in character as Ivan Drago, giving some details about his backstory. “I’m a fighter from the Soviet Union! I fight all my life and I never lose! Soon I fight Rocky Balboa, and the world will see his defeat!” he growls in a heavy (but not very convincing) Russian accent. It’s a lot of talking for a character who barely speaks in the actual film. (According to IMDb, Lundgren has only nine lines in the entire film. He says 40 words in the trailer alone!)Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)In much the same way Drago speaks almost as much in the Rocky IV trailer as in the film itself, Jason Voorhees spends almost all of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan outside of New York City. But the teaser emphasizes just the last (and best) part of the film, with Jason gazing out at the Big Apple with his back to the camera over a piano and saxophone version of the classic NYC anthem “(Theme From) New York, New York.” The trailer starts on a shot of the skyline then pans down to slowly reveal Jason, until he spins around (gigantic knife in hand) as a young woman walks by. It hits a perfect, darkly hilarious note. If only Jason Takes Manhattan was actually like this.Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)This teaser, which preceded the arrival of Terminator 2 in theaters by months, was directed by special effects guru (and T-800 designer) Stan Winston. It depicted a factory assembling the new Terminator and, in a way, it’s almost a prequel to the film. You could envision this sequence as the creation of the specific T-800 that Schwarzenegger played in the film. (Schwarzenegger himself appears briefly, flexing his muscles and then staring menacingly into the camera with glowing red eyes.)Toys (1992)The Toys trailer is another movie star direct address to camera. In this case, though, Robin Williams makes no attempt to stay in character. Instead, he stands in a wheat field and riffs like he’s doing a standup set or an appearance on The Tonight Show, launching into impressions of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dustin Hoffman while joking about the movie’s release date. It’s unfiltered Robin Williams — but, in retrospect, it was probably not an encouraging sign that the studio tried to sell Toys as an excuse to watch Robin Williams riff rather than by showing what it looked like or what it was about. This just makes it look like “The Robin Williams Show.”Alien 3 (1992)Fox was in such a rush to get Alien 3 into theaters in the summer of 1992 that they started advertising it before they had even pinned down the final screenplay. In other words; This trailer has footage shot just for the trailer because the distributor wasn’t entirely sure what the actual movie would look like yet. That’s quite evident in the voiceover, which promises that this third Alien will reveal that “on Earth, everyone can hear you scream.” (When it opened in multiplexes, Alien 3 contained exactly zero scenes set on Earth.)Jurassic Park (1993)Like Terminator 2, the first teaser for Jurassic Park is almost a prologue to the actual film. It follows the miners who found the mosquito encased in amber which made the creation of genetically-engineered dinosaurs possible, and ends with a slow zoom into the eyepiece of a microscope before revealing the film’s title and iconic logo. Zero dinosaurs are seen, but the voiceover explains the premise involving the mosquito, dino blood, and DNA before stating that thanks to this scientific breakthrough, “man and dinosaur shared the Earth” for the first time. It then ends with a bullseye of a little button: “Jurassic Park ... this summer, director Steven Spielberg will take you there.”GoldenEye (1995)This all-time great teaser introduced Pierce Brosnan’s new James Bond to audiences for the first time. After a series of title cards explains that you can still count “on one man,” a shadowy Brosnan struts into frame, then blasts away the letters in “on one man” one by one until only “007” remains. Then he walks into a perfectly lit close-up and quips “You were expecting someone else?” followed by a montage of action highlights from GoldenEye. Just like that, the film had erased the negative stereotype of Bond as a fossil from a bygone era and re-established the character as the coolest action hero on the planet. ( I was a 14-year-old kid who barely knew anything about James Bond when this teaser first dropped, so I can tell you from first-hand experience: It worked.)Godzilla (1998)Everything about 1998’s Godzilla was big. (The film chose the tagline “Size Does Matter” for a reason.) Rather than just show clips from the film, this trailer got its own little storyline, with a group of kids on a field trip to a natural history museum that gets trampled by everyone’s favorite atomic-powered kaiju. Coming a few years after Jurassic Park, the symbolism of Godzilla stomping on a massive dinosaur skeleton was unmistakable. If only the film had actually made good on its promise to outdo Spielberg’s dino-masterpiece.The Blair Witch Project (1999)Artisan Entertainment’s marketing campaign for The Blair Witch Project was arguably more impressive than the film itself. They stoked enormous mainstream interest in this little faux documentary by blurring the line between fiction and reality, and leaning into the idea that this was a real doc about a group of missing student filmmakers. To that end, they also made all sorts of bespoke ads for the film that contained little to no material from The Blair Witch Project itself, including a Sci-Fi channel special that detailed the legend of the Blair Witch and this teaser filled with fake news reports about the missing students. As hard as it may be to believe today, these trailers worked like a charm. Not only was The Blair Witch Project a record-breaking hit, many audience members became convinced it was a legitimate documentary for a while.Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)The enormous hype about the return of Star Wars in The Phantom Menace explains the oddball teaser for Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. (The two movies opened in theaters just two weeks apart.) “The saga will continue!” the voiceover declares, in reference to The Phantom Menace’s advertising, before Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil reveals himself and quips “You were expecting someone else?” Look, if it worked for James Bond, why wouldn’t it work for a James Bond spoof like Austin Powers? And, in fact, it did work; The Spy Who Shagged Me earned over $310 million worldwide, nearly five times as much as the first Austin Powers.Comedian (2002)In the ’90s and early 2000s, Jerry Seinfeld was almost as well-known for his American Express ads as for his hit NBC sitcom. He was known as something of an advertising savant, a reputation that was only enhanced by the ingenious trailer for Seinfeld’s standup documentary Comedian. Instead of scenes from the film, the spot featured one of those movie trailer voiceover guys (played by real movie trailer voiceover guy Hal Douglas) struggling to come up with a way to describe Comedian, which is “not one of those kinds of movies.” All his usual tricks (“In a world! In a land! One man!”) won’t work this time. This was all surely rooted in the reality of the fact that a documentary about standup comedy isn’t an easy sell. Still, the results cleverly expressed Seinfeld’s observational style of humor without every showing the man himself.Spider-Man (2002)In perhaps the most famous example of this sort of trailer, a group of bank robbers making their getaway in a helicopter are captured by an unseen Friendly Neighborhood Wall-Crawler and webbed between a pair of buildings. It’s a great tease, but that’s not what made it memorable. The reason everyone now remembers this teaser is because the pair of buildings where Spidey spun his web was the World Trade Center, and this early teaser for 2002’s Spider-Man played in theaters in the summer of 2001, just a few weeks before the events of 9/11. Sony pulled the trailer after September 11 — which is why, all these years later, people still talk about it.Cars (2006)Pixar played a deft little sleight of hand trick with the teaser for Cars, opening it with a scene of pastoral beauty, a bumblebee pollenating a flower. It looks like a deleted scene from A Bug’s Life — but then the bee splats on the windshield of Mater the Tow Truck. His pal Lightning McQueen tries to console him, but then he drives through a whole swarm of bugs. A subsequent montage of NASCAR-style race footage featuring sentient race cars established the unique look and tone of this movie, which is like a cross between Days of Thunder and a book of dumb kids jokes.Transformers (2007)While Steven Spielberg only produced the Transformers films, this teaser feels a lot like the one for his Jurassic Park. Instead of showing the main special effects attraction, you create a prologue that grounds a fantastical story in real-world science. Here, a NASA Mars rover — something that was very much in the news throughout the mid-2000s — encounters a mysterious alien presence on the Red Planet. The grainy footage doesn’t reveal the alien’s precise form, but then the logo for the movie appears onscreen ... Transformers. It’s a cool, classy spot — maybe too cool and classy, since the movie itself was more about Bayhem and raunchy humor.The Social Network (2010)Widely regarded as one of the great movie trailers in history, this clip combines a choral cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” with images from Facebook that gradually reveals an image of Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg, before transitioning into a few scenes from The Social Network. This unusual approach worked so well it became one of the most copied trailers in history; 15 years later, you still regularly see teasers scored by sad cover versions of classic pop songs.Prometheus (2012)This one straddles the line between trailer and full-blown short film. In Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, Guy Pearce plays the dying head of the Weyland Corporation of the Alien franchise. In the viral ad “TED 2023,” which was released several months before Prometheus opened in theaters, Pearce plays Weyland as a much younger man, giving a TED talk about technology in the the “futuristic” year of 2023, decades before the events of Prometheus. Directed by Scott’s son Luke, and written by Ridley Scott and Prometheus co-writer Damon Lindelof, the short/trailer capitalized on the popularity of TED Talks in the early 2010s, and gave this sci-fi film some real-world grounding.Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)This one contains perhaps the least amount of “exclusive” footage of any trailer on this list. That’s precisely what makes it notable. The trailer for Spider-Man: Homecoming contained an image of Michael Keaton’s Vulture swooping down through a hotel atrium, and concluded with an impressive shot of Tom Holland’s Spidey and Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man flying through Manhattan. Neither appeared in the final film. In an interview with this very website, Homecoming director Jon Watts confirmed both were created specifically for marketing purposes. The Vulture one was made for a Comic-Con sizzle real; the Iron Man and Spider-Man one was for the trailer, because, in Watts’ words, “they wanted a shot of Spider-Man and Iron Man flying together” but the actual footage they had from the movie “didn’t look that great.” (“I feel a little weird that there’s a shot in the trailer that’s not in the movie at all, but it’s a cool shot,” Watts added.)These movies are way better than their reviews from critics in the 1990s would have you believe.

View Original Article