Weapons Shows Trailers Don’t Need Spoilers To Draw Crowds

Weapons proves that audiences don’t need everything spoiled for them before the movie even begins.

It’s been a big year for horror. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners did absolutely huge numbers when it was released in April. Final Destination Bloodlines became the highest-grossing installment in the franchise. 28 Laters was another big hit. Companion, The Monkey, Bring Her Back, and Together — all these movies have done pretty well.

Weapons drew crowds without dropping spoilers

Along comes Weapons, the latest from Barbarian’s Zach Cregger, and it, too, is lighting up the box office. Per Deadline, the movie made approximately $43.5 million domestically during its opening weekend, while its worldwide total sits at $71.8 million. 

According to Variety, the Warner Bros. Pictures movie had a $38 million production budget, meaning Cregger’s movie has already made its money back, and it did so without feeling the need to spoil anything in any of the trailers.

Nearly all of the marketing material for Weapons has been solely focused on the film’s inciting incident. As one of the posters for the movie puts it, “Last night at 2:17 a.m., every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark…and they never came back.”

They’ve leaned into that in some fun ways; a bunch of Ring camera-style images and videos featuring the children running away were released, while there was also the website that quickly went viral and teased that the movie may take place in the same world as Barbarian. None of these things, however, revealed anything about what happened to those kids.

Studios need to listen to complaints and keep trailers subtle

It was a big bet for Warner Bros. Pictures; in order to sell audiences on a mystery, it needs to be a mystery that’s intriguing and worth solving. Luckily, Cregger’s movie delivers on that front; the movie has been getting phenomenal responses from critics and fans alike. Still, there’s no guarantee that such a vague marketing campaign was going to work.

Yet, we’ve seen this begin to happen more and more. Longlegs had a similar strategy in that they never showed you Nicolas Cage’s face in any of the marketing material; rather, they just vaguely hinted that it was going to be a weird, scary movie, and that got people to show up. Even look at something on the total opposite side of the spectrum, like The Naked Gun — they didn’t give away every joke in the trailers, they just promised audiences that they were going to laugh, and it worked.

Rather than giving away a movie’s entire plot in a trailer — which is a trend you’d think would have died by now but is still very much alive (looking at you, Speak No Evil) — getting people hooked with an intriguing but subtle premise is how studios should be approaching their marketing. Nobody would have guessed that Weapons would outgross Disney’s legacy Freakier Friday sequel, but that happened.

People want original movies. Artists are making original movies. Studios just need to get out of the way sometimes and let that originality speak for itself.

Source: Comingsoon.net