Gallery: The Gripping, Mind-Blowing, Thrilling Evolution of the Movie Trailer
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1 | Hyperbolic Title Cards Cards do everything in Hollywood's early trailers: show titles, name stars, celebrate technology. But most of all, they sell the movie with outrageous superlatives—like "classic" and "sensation." Hyperbole defines the era—nearly 80 percent of the trailers we watched use it in some way.
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2 | Production Monopoly By the 1940s, movie advertising is essentially controlled by one company: the National Screen Service. Its trailer formula—title cards, voice-over, a few key scenes, and a lengthy cast run-through—dominates the era.
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3 | Stars Shine The Hollywood star system is bright and bankable—Bogart and costar Katharine Hepburn can sell a movie just by showing up. Story is downplayed; famous faces fill almost two-thirds of the trailer's run time.
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4 | Disembodied Voice A male narrator declaims the film's unique achievements—that *The African Queen* was "filmed in the treacherous wilds of Africa," for instance.
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5 | Technology! Widescreen views and fuller color—thanks to Cinerama, CineScope, Technicolor, Eastman Color—sell more tickets, but they come at a price: The added costs eat into profits, so studios must continuously trumpet new tech.
