Devil Wears Prada 2 to Spider-Man 4: is the Hollywood hype machine starting too early?

The Guardian

2 days ago

Do you want to know who might be starring, cameoing or in some way appearing in the upcoming sequel to The Devil Wears Prada? Well, you might not have a choice. Ever since filming on the Anne Hathaway/Meryl Streep reunion commenced in New York a few weeks ago, set photos and accompanying news items have become plentiful (don't click that link if you don't want to know the rumors about a major star). Of course, gossip pages breathlessly reporting casting rumors are not sanctioned by a movie studio, like a teaser, poster, trailer or announcement video. At the same time, the movie hype machine has been blurring the line between genuine marketing and tweet-grade micro-teases all summer long.
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For example: is there a teaser trailer for next summer's Spider-Man: Brand New Day? It's the next Marvel movie after this July's Fantastic Four reboot, and plenty of summer blockbusters-to-be have called their shots with a teaser a year in advance, so it would make sense to get a little something out there. A teaser is kinda-sorta what Sony posted a few weeks ago, only it was hyped up as a 'suit reveal', which seems like an attempt to redress a 20-second teaser in literal new clothes. It also seems like a backfire if the strategy involves anyone beyond the most diehard 5% of movie-watchers realizing or caring that Tom Holland walks up to the camera wearing a Spider-Man costume that is slightly different than the six other Spider-Man costumes he's donned in other appearances. There is also a behind-the-scenes video of a movie that's barely started filming. It recalls the absurdly lengthy 'chair reveal' of cast members from Avengers: Doomsday parceled out over five hours, which is getting its own sequel soon. (Not everyone was announced, of course. Not least because the movie's screenplay was not finished at the time of that announcement and filming commencement.)
Even Christopher Nolan, who has generally mastered the art of keeping his highly anticipated movies to the realm of teasers and trailers – a teaser for his Imax-shot version of The Odyssey emerged just about a year before its planned July 2026 release – succumbed to the hype machine when that Odyssey teaser was accompanied by tickets for select showtimes going on sale. That's right, if you want to plan a movie outing 50 weeks from now, you can see about booking an Odyssey ticket at your local Imax (if applicable). Or rather, you could have if your AMC app didn't crash; most of those showings sold out quickly.
To some extent, this is business as usual. There's been year-out hype for movies for literal decades at this point; Alien 3 had a teaser trailer that infamously teased a movie with a completely different premise (Aliens on Earth?!). Some of it is also just the studios attempting to compete with the speed and ferocity of digital-era hype, to be heard above the constant buzz of phone notifications over virtually nothing (as well as the semi-regular global calamity). After all, the days of getting by on trailers, posters and TV ads alone are long gone, right?
Maybe not. The biggest global opening of the past weekend was the horror movie Weapons, which exceeded expectations for its launch based largely off of ... trailers that explained the premise of the movie. Obviously there's more to a marketing campaign than that. In the spring, the film launched a website mocked up to look like news postings about Maybrook, the fictional town in the movie, with shades of The Blair Witch Project from 1999. But the baseline of the movie's marketing was a couple of trailers that showed a lot of creepy imagery but said little about the multi-character plot beyond what the movie reveals in its first two minutes: one night, a group of third-graders from the same class mysteriously rise from their beds, run outside, and disappear into the night. The movie is about figuring out what happened to them; no casting announcements, announcement videos, or greetings from the set needed. For well over a year, about the only thing anyone repeated about this movie in the Hollywood trade publications was that it was a 'horror epic' with some elements in common with another 1999 classic, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia.
Of course, Weapons operated with the luxury of less attention from both its studio and the outside press. It's not the kind of superhero movie or high-profile sequel that gets clicks a year before it comes out. But this strategy isn't only employed for smaller films. Disney's Lilo & Stitch remake, the second-biggest global hit of the year so far, certainly had plenty of promotion, tie-ins, brand activations and so on. But it successfully waited until much closer to its release date, putting out a couple of traditional low-footage teasers at the end of 2024, and a full trailer a few months before the movie's release in 2025. Sinners, an ambitious movie with an audience more in line with Weapons, also managed to avoid selling much-hyped nothingburgers, and was able to take audiences by surprise.
Next year's crop of much-hyped sequels will still probably draw crowds. Streep, Hathaway, Nolan, Spider-Man and whoever is in the Avengers these days all have plenty of fans. But the rush to blow up what would normally be lines in a press release to an epic and ceremonious scale still feels sweaty – maybe sweatier, even, as if companies including Disney are desperate to project the image of day-stopping news when another name of an old X-Men cast member turns up on a chair. As recently as the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, the company prized spoiler protection, with almost none of the movie's various in-joke cameos signaled ahead of time. That seemed like good marketing, but maybe it was just fear of the fact that many of those cameos were intentionally expectations-undermining jokes, rather than mega-applause moments. It's harder to tell in retrospect because the hype machine has spent so much time accidentally eliminating the difference between teasers, spoilers and piles of random crumbs.