Trailer of Tears

By Nikki Finke, LA Weekly. Posted April 7, 2005.

Adam Sandler looks like Albert Brooks' older brother. Nicole Kidman should have known better. And Christian Bale plays Batman not gay. Got that? NOT GAY!

Oh, the pratfalls and pitfalls of the latest movie trailers.

We all know the so-called summer movie season is as fake as everything else in Hollywood. That's because summer movies start bowing in spring, and if the moguls had their way, as early as the first winter blizzard (since summer ticket sales usually account for 40 percent of The Industry's annual revenue). The only thing stopping the suits from ordering a rewrite of the annual calendar -- hey, these guys are so power-driven and delusional they think they can cue a full moon whenever they want one -- is the fact that many of their films simply aren't ready any earlier. So what we have instead of wet prints are movie trailers (and, on the internet, lots and lots of lots of movie trailers) to handicap which studio stupidos are about to involuntarily spend more time with their families.

In an insanely unscientific business that guesses wrong more than it guesses right -- and given the lack of accurate alternative predictors -- trailers are as good an indicator of what is, and isn't, going to be a suckfest as, say, the quality of the craft services on a shoot. But a trailer is not only the public's first look at a picture, it's also the competition's first look as well.

So it wasn't the one-two punch of Spielberg and Cruise that suddenly gave Fox fits about the upcoming War of the Worlds. (After all, 20th had the same combo in the underperforming Minority Report.) Rather, it was the "wow" factor of the WOTW trailer that made Fox push Fantastic Four off the same June 29 release date and back to July 8. Score one for DreamWorks/Paramount. On the other hand, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory looked like a heavyweight since it had the buzzworthy Johnny Depp and the same release date as his two-year-old hit Pirates of the Caribbean. Then rival studios got their first glimpse of the kiddie classic's trailer and its creepy, psychedelic take and Johnny Depp in drag as Anna Wintour. Oops! Now New Line has moved its Vince-'n'-Owen romp Wedding Crashers onto the Chocolate Factory date, and Paramount followed with its Sundance rap saga Hustle and Flow.

Because we love the smell of Maalox in the morning, let's review some summer movie trailers and decide who's going to need an Rx for stronger stuff, like Thorazine ...

Bewitched: Ever since this trailer debuted on AOL, the whole town's been talking about it. And not in a nice way. Sony marketing czar Jeff Blake is one of the best in the business, but even he can't make a Prada purse out of this pig's ear of a film. (One word: Godzilla.) The trailer lets the cat out of the bag that this movie is not a remake of the TV show: It's a movie about the making of the TV show. Talk about a cockamamie concept. There's not one funny bit or line in the trailer, which makes us think there's not one funny bit or line in the movie or Sony would have used it. This is like a fun-house hall of mirrors, without the fun.

War of the Worlds: This trailer looks like Twister meets Independence Day. And since both of those ads were great, and the movies were monster hits, everything is going WOTW's way. Sure, there's something unseemly in a post-9/11, post-tsunami world about huge civic destruction, so when you see the people running from a somersaulting highway, it's not so much awesome as dreadful. Also, I kept looking for the Scientology "assist" tent, but guess it got cut out. Still, there's no way the wow factor of this trailer portends a movie battling the bow-wow factor.

Contact Nikki Finke at nikkifinke@deadlinehollywood.com

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