It’s the ultimate marketing issue for a movie studio. You want people to see your new movie—so you tease something guaranteed to make them want to go. The problem is the filmmaker intended it to be a surprise. So, do you ruin the surprise in the trailers to ensure people go see the movie? Or do you save it so people who go have a better experience?
More often than not these days, studios choose the former. It’s the easier, safer move. But, for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, multiple major surprises were completely held out of trailers and director Adam Wingard was very happy about it.
“That was, initially, a conundrum for me because I know that some of the stuff we don’t show is some of our most impressive stuff from the movie,” the director told io9. “It’s exciting, though. I watch a lot of the reaction videos and stuff. And some people are like, ‘Oh, I’ve already seen the movie.’ It’s like, ‘No you haven’t seen the movie.’ And I think they’re going to be really pleasantly surprised when they realize, ‘Wow, the trailer seemed like it showed everything, but there’s so much left up its sleeve.’”
What specifically are we talking about? To reveal that, we have to get into spoilers.
Courtney Milan writes books about carriages, corsets, and smartwatches. Her books have received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist. She is a New York Times and a USA Today Bestseller.
Courtney pens a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and basically anything and everything else.
Before she started writing romance, Courtney got a graduate degree in theoretical physical chemistry from UC Berkeley. After that, just to shake things up, she went to law school at the University of Michigan and graduated summa cum laude. Then she did a handful of clerkships. She was a law professor for a while. She now writes full-time.
Courtney is represented by Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency.