The old saying of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is being forgotten little by little it would appear since HBO Max has taken it upon itself to create modern trailers for classic movies, which might excite some people, but in truth kind of makes the same mistake that trailers make today. That mistake is in giving too much away, basically granting the audience a synopsis of the movie that they can use to piece together before ever watching it. Granted, the trailers leave out some points of the movie, but the issue is that they give away some of the best lines, best parts, and a good chunk of the plot in a minute or two of running time, and therefore kind of ruin it for a lot of people. Those that have seen the movies might not care one way or another since the understanding is they’ve seen it, they know what happens, and there’s no huge surprise. The trailer to a movie is an enticement, something that’s just enough to get a person interested in seeing what else is there since really all a person needs is a few seconds of the right clips and they’ll likely be willing to watch the movie. Updating a trailer can be a positive thing, but in this case, it’s giving away too much of what’s going on in the movie and making a good case as to why some of them don’t need to be watched the whole way through to get the full effect of what’s going on.
From Alien to The Exorcist and more there are several trailers from decades past that were fine the way they were, and of course, there are some that could be updated, but what HBO Max has done kind of works against the purpose of trying to get a person to see a movie since there’s no need when the story is being laid out for a person. Seriously, when this much is given away without requiring a person to sit through a movie it’s self-defeating at best since the audience might as well be told what’s going to transpire before they get a chance to sit down and watch. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a minor nuisance really since it’s not necessary to watch the trailer before the movie, but many people still tend to judge which movies they’ll watch by watching the trailer, which is an issue then since why bother watching the whole movie when the trailer is going to give you roughly the whole story? It has to be one of the least wise moves that’s been made in a while since modernizing trailers could be a very positive thing given that it could make them look far more appealing, but adding too much content into them is ridiculous since it indicates that HBO might think that the audience needs to be spoonfed the information to a movie in order to really understand what’s going on. This might not be the intent of the site, but it definitely has the same feel as one might get from being pandered to by someone that’s trying to ‘help’ by explaining things over and over in a condescending manner.
Taking things too personal isn’t necessary since it doesn’t feel as though HBO is aiming this at anyone and it doesn’t feel that it’s mean to be negative in any way. But the fact that these advertisements were updated like this does manage to put a question mark on a lot of minds since updating something and giving away too much and not leaving enough behind is kind of a problem. Of course, it’s only a problem if a person really sees it that way, and since there are likely people who might enjoy this switch, so be it. A hardcore moviegoer might not really enjoy the ads, but a casual moviegoer might not care. In fact, some people might like being given more of the story before they go watch it since some people don’t really want to guess or can’t keep up as well with older movies, which is true in fact. There are plenty of people that still get lost when trying to figure out what’s going on from scene to scene, so it might be that this method could help those that aren’t able to keep up as easily. It’s still a bit of an annoyance to those of us that can follow the scenes of a movie without fail, but again, if a person has seen them it’s not a big deal, since those that haven’t seen the movies can choose to watch the trailers or not. It does feel like a very dumb idea to be serious, but oh well, some folks need the extra help.
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