The art of the tease.

There's an informative (if slightly depressing) article in the New Yorker about Hollywood movie marketing. As you might imagine, it's a business focussed more on getting bums on seats than making great cinema. This bit confirmed my suspicions about one particular film trailer:

The marketing advantage that studios have over other industries is that they can give out free samples of a movie as advertising—promotional material that feels like content. But filmmakers object when a trailer reveals too much of the story, or their best fireball, or their funniest joke. Tony Sella, the Fox marketer, wanted to end his trailer for “The Simpsons Movie” with Homer walking his pet Spider-Pig upside down across the ceiling and singing his Spider-Pig song. “The writers told me, ‘Absolutely not, you can’t use it,’ ” Sella recalls. “I said, ‘O.K., we can not use Spider-Pig, and the theatres will be three-quarters full, and the audience will be tremendously amused when they see it. Or you can have lines around the block, and half the people will be saying, ‘Wait till you see Spider-Pig!’ to the other half.” Spider-Pig stayed in.

I swear I could hear that conversation in my head when I saw the trailer for the Simpsons Movie. Figures.