Teaser Trailers Vs. Trailers

Teaser trailers are generally speaking, released long in advance of the film’s release to try and ‘tease’ the audience and generate interest before the main trailer is out. Trailers are generally very short (between 30-90 seconds) and rarely contain a lot of shots from the actual film and the majority of the time it’s a truncated version of a full trailer. Some teaser trailers include footage that was never intended to be in the film, notably Pixar trailers do this. One of the earliest teaser trailers was for Superman when it was nearly a year late of its scheduled release. Therefore, they used a teaser trailer to regenerate the interest lost due to its long delay. Teaser trailers are sometimes ridiculously unconventional; take Cloverfield for example. On the Transformers DVD’s extra features there was a teaser trailer for Cloverfield did not release any information about the film, not even the title. The only text on the trailer was the name of the producer (J.J. Abrahams) and the release date. This almost defeats the point of generating interest for the film because they do not know what it is. Avant-garde style teaser trailers I believe can be sometimes created in a way that defeats the point of marketing the film. Theatrical trailers have a MAXIMUM length of 2:30mins in America as enforced the the MPAA. Clearly, as the normal trailers are of much larger length they can contain a lot more information and generate a lot more interest but don’t generate it in the same way that teaser trailers do.