In a world where there are 25 minutes of previews before every movie, here’s why studios pay millions to secure a spot in front of summer’s biggest blockbusters.
Anyone going to see Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts* this weekend can expect to watch eight—perhaps even 10—movie trailers before the feature begins. Throw in an ad for popcorn and Nicole Kidman waxing poetic about the power of cinema, and the pre-show lineup can stretch to nearly a half-hour.
Even if that can seem like a drag to an audience, those are highly valuable minutes to both the movie studios and the theater chains. In an era when theatrical attendance continues to decline—the domestic box office grossed $8.7 billion last year, a dip of more than 3% from 2023, and ticket sales dropped 7%—trailers remain the top driver of awareness and decision-making for most moviegoers. According to National Research Group’s biannual survey, 36% of those between the ages 12-74 say they first heard about the most recent movie they saw in theaters through a trailer, more than any other source.
Because Thunderbolts* is the first anticipated blockbuster of the summer movie season—the 18-week period between the first of May and Labor Day that accounts for 40% of the annual box office total in the U.S. and Canada—its preview space is one of the most important marketing opportunities for the biggest releases, including Paramount’s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Universal’s Jurassic World: Rebirth, and Warner Bros.’ Superman.
With fierce competition for these theoretically finite slots, there’s another reason for the increased number of trailers—theater chains are selling preview time to the highest bidder. “The most valuable real estate this industry has is trailer play. That’s where we cross-pollinate success,” Neon CEO Tom Quinn said last month at Cinemacon in Las Vegas. “But I, as an independent, don’t always get trailer play. I have to go buy that trailer play with every other studio. And we play a big game, but it’s very expensive.”
The particulars of this pay-to-play system are whispered about with a level of secrecy that Ethan Hunt’s Impossible Missions Force would appreciate. Despite the symbiotic relationship between studios and theaters—or mutually assured destruction, depending on who you ask—the two sides often operate on a need-to-know, no-paper-trail basis. For fear of upsetting the delicate system, neither side is eager to speak on the record.
According to Hollywood lore, it was Sony executive Jeff Blake who first began paying for trailer placement in 2001. Back then, theaters averaged four previews per movie. The two slots closest to the actual feature were guaranteed to the company distributing the movie, and the others were chosen by the theater operator. That is until Blake shelled out an estimated $100,000, split among four theater chains, to ensure that a 60-second preview for the Rob Schneider comedy The Animal played in front of that summer’s big May release, The Mummy Returns.
Today, Hollywood’s major studios routinely strike year-long marketing agreements with major theater chains including AMC, Regal and Cinemark to guarantee trailer play in front of the biggest releases. Those deals range from $2 million to $5 million each, proportionate to the size of the chain, and can include other in-theater marketing opportunities such as ads on concession stands or theater marquees.
What exactly that money buys, however, is not always clear. Most moviegoers would assume the trailer system would be similar to any other advertising expenditure, but in practice studio executives say it can often feel closer to a bribe. Studios typically select “target” preferences for which trailers to put with which movies, and exhibitors reply with a certain percentage of screenings it can offer for each title, usually between 50% and 100%.
The tradition of reserving the two final previews for free for the studio that produced the movie continues to hold, but the value of the other four to six slots is constantly in flux. Six-figure transactions for additional trailer play can often materialize at a moment’s notice. This dynamic marketplace is driven by a movie’s predicted popularity, the amount of money paid, and above all, the fear of competition.
Further complicating the marketplace, each studio has no idea what the others are paying a particular chain, and chains don’t know what each studio is paying the competition. Beyond that, studios don’t know whether the preview screenings they receive will be in the best auditoriums or the best showtimes.
To help strategize, some studios have hired third-party trailer auditing companies, who send people to physically sit in theaters across the country and write down the order of all the trailers played before a given movie.
“It’s always been sensitive and back room,” says one distribution executive, who believes there should be more transparency but declines to be identified by name. “It’s coming from this place of we’re going to maximize our leverage against you. A lot of theatrical distribution is rooted in that tradition.”
Until the pandemic, Disney was known for never having to pay for trailer placement because of its dominant position in the marketplace. The mere threat of withholding a film or increasing its rental fee (the percentage split of box office gross) was enough to ensure good trailer placement from theater chains. Rival studios also relied on Disney’s new releases so they could advertise their biggest movies ahead of them.
However, Disney has only held the largest market share of the domestic box office once in the five years since the pandemic, and in recent years Hollywood insiders believe the company has started to participate in the pay-for-play trailer system like everyone else. (Disney declined to comment for this story.)
The trailer strategy gets even more complicated after that. Any preview slots not reserved by these annual guarantees are sold on a one-off basis or in mini-packages to independent distributors such as A24 and Neon, who in some cases pay up to $1 million across all the chains to secure a percentage of trailer play in front of a particular movie.
The irony of this high-pressure environment is that it is relatively low stakes. A presumed blockbuster like Thunderbolts* has a marketing budget of well over $100 million, and the amount of money spent on TV advertisements for one movie alone can be more than a studio might spend on trailer placement for the entire year.
Still, studio executives say that reaching people who have already bought movie tickets and then getting their undivided attention for a trailer can often the moment when they decide whether they want to see an upcoming movie. Meanwhile, TV commercials, digital ads and billboards serve primarily to remind viewers of a movie’s release date.
That’s why studios can spend as much as $200,000 to produce a two-and-a-half minute trailer—or, in the case of Thunderbolts*, even three full-length trailers across a seven-month marketing campaign.
This combination of the increased length of trailers and the increased inventory over the years has seemingly pushed some moviegoers to the edge of their patience. In Connecticut, a state senator introduced a bill in January that would require theaters to post the movie’s actual start time as opposed to the time when the previews begin.. And at CinemaCon, the national gathering of theater owners, there were multiple conversations around reviving the effort to cap trailers at two minutes (a guideline sent out in 2014 by the National Association of Theater Owners was mostly ignored by studios).
“People love trailers,” says Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at ComScore, a leading box office data provider. “But [theaters] have to walk that fine line—you don’t want to overdo it because then you burn people out before the curtains even open on the feature.”
For studios, a good trailer often doubles as the most impactful piece of digital marketing in a movie’s campaign, once it is posted on YouTube and other social media platforms. According to the same NRG survey, Gen-Z moviegoers said that social media and word of mouth outrank trailers in influence, but when asked what type of social media content drives their choices, trailers once again reigned supreme.
Daniel Loria, a senior vice president of content strategy at Los Angeles-based Boxoffice Pro, says that online trailer views are a strong indicator of box office performance. “That’s a big data point that we use here internally in our forecasting,” Loria says. “Having trailers available online is a real game changer for movie marketing.”
There is, however, one other marketing force that in recent years has proven even more powerful and unpredictable—online virality. When a movie catches on organically—whether it’s an army of teen “Gentleminions” in suits going to see Minions: The Rise of Gru, the M3gan dance trend, or the recent “chicken jockey” mania around A Minecraft Movie—it can cause a movie to vastly overperform the predicted box office results.
But attempts by distributors to create those viral moments have proven largely futile, so for now, the focus remains on trailers.
“I think what everyone in this industry has learned is that viral moments of the movies have to be organic. You can’t will a Barbenheimer into existence,” says Loria. “But in a theater, you know you’ve got their attention. And you’ve got two to three minutes to sell the movie. That is so valuable.”
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