I had a dream once. I dreamed that this would be a summer chock full of unforgettable movies that would have me going back day after day for repeat viewings. I don’t have that dream anymore. Instead I have nightmares about the summer where I keep going to the movies but just keep getting more and more let down. Oh wait that’s no dream… that’s reality.
What a disappointment.
My friends tell me I just let my expectations get too high and that’s why I’m being let down. Really? Is there something wrong with having high expectations? Someone makes a movie I enjoy so I expect them to get better at what they do and I raise my expectations. I don’t see the problem. Then throw in the advertising giants cutting these amazing trailers and the hype(wo)men on every single website out there. How can someone not get overly excited?
I can’t help but wonder if things were better 10 years ago when a movie wasn’t constantly being thrown in your face everywhere you turned. Instead we are bombarded with people trying to sell us on how great a movie is going to be. It used to be you found out about an upcoming movie by seeing the
trailer attached to another movie. Then you saw some posters and ads a
month or two before the movie came out and maybe a few commercials.
There was a mystery to every movie. Did they all end up being great
movies? No, but at least we didn’t know everything about them before
seeing them. Now they set themselves up for failure because most movies can’t live up to this new kind of hype. They are building our expectations up! Today we know an entire storyline before going in and probably a few twists. So when we are done seeing a movie we wonder why there wasn’t more to it. We didn’t figure it out right before seeing the movie either. OH NO, we knew everything a year in advance because that’s when the advertising started. Studios won’t stop advertising until a market is over saturated. I’m sick of it.
So how do we fix this?
You can do what I do and follow 3 rules that I recently created.
Rule #1. I only watch one trailer and that’s it. Oh and no five minute trailers. I give you two minutes and I won’t watch anymore. That means covering my eyes and ears for anything else(ridiculous but works every time).
Rule #2. No commercials. It’s the easiest way to give away every highlight of the movie. Change the channel or if u dvr fast forward.
Rule #3. No reviews or sites covering film news a day or two before a movie I want to see comes out. They love to give their reviews away in the title of a post and I like to formulate my own opinion before I take someone elses.
Try them out. It’s not foolproof and you will still get let down, but it’s a step in the right direction. Who knows maybe the studios will take notice and take things down a notch.