For me, there's nothing better than a great movie trailer.
In an industry littered with rising ticket prices, interminable box office discourse, and increasingly elaborate popcorn buckets, there remains something intangibly magic – and community-focused – about picking apart a new teaser frame-by-frame and sharing in the hype with an audience of millions.
Which is why Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Dune 3's bizarre trailer rollouts have disappointed me so much.
The chief offender has to be Spider-Man. In a video posted to social media, star Tom Holland explained that the marketing baton would be handed over to you, the fans.
"To show you our appreciation, we are doing something that has never been done before," Holland explained but, in hindsight, it reads like a threat.
What followed was a stop-start (and excruciating) 24 hours that zipped across nations to provide expectant fans with two seconds of footage each.
In theory, a fun idea. Bringing in everyone from children learning to love Spidey for the first time to those dyed-in-the-web fanatics of the wallcrawler.
In practice, the whole exercise was immensely frustrating – and not at all indicative of the quality of the finished product. Who wants to see a fraction of a movie they're excited about when they can just wait to see it all in motion?
Sure, it may have generated social media posts, impressions, or any other metric that may look good for a marketing campaign, but it failed in any meaningful way to present Spider-Man: Brand New Day as a movie I wanted to see. Do you know what did do that? The actual trailer – which premiered a day later, and instantly thwipped its way to becoming the talk of the town.
Vertically challenged
But Spider-Man wasn't the only guilty party. Arise, Dune: Part Three. With its sweeping vistas and punchy, muscular set-pieces, Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi epics are modern blockbusters at their finest.
That makes the decision to premiere the Dune 3 trailer on TikTok – complete with a clunky Q&A – all the more baffling.
I have nothing against the platform itself, but a TikTok premiere is the antithesis of what these movies are all about: the Dune: Part Three trailer premiered on a bad (vertical) format and instantly felt exclusionary by being siloed onto a social media app that anyone over the age of 35 probably feels faintly perplexed by.
Going back just to last month, The Mandalorian and Grogu's Super Bowl fumble also proves the staying power of trailers. In front of a global audience, the upcoming Star Wars movie opted for an odd advert spoof instead of capitalizing on the bright lights. The fact that it only regained that momentum by deploying a full trailer weeks later is evidence enough that traditional trailers should stay put.
So, enough with the experimenting. After all, there remains a sense of wonder to trailers, one of the few remaining holdovers in an industry that seemingly caters to everything except heading to a movie theatre.
Some trailers are good, some are bad. But they almost always capture our attention for the fleeting moments they're on our screens.
Put it this way: With all due respect, no one will remember the name of the ninth person in line for Brand New Day's rollout (Mark in Korea, in case you were wondering), but they will remember Punisher storming into Spider-Man for the first time and a possible glimpse of Sadie Sink's character launching a tidal wave of X-Men speculation. Let's not mess with a good thing.
For more, check out all the new characters in the Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer, plus every movie release date to look forward to in 2026.
