I looked at the duration of movies trailers last week. I discovered that the average trailer is 114 seconds long, with documentaries and historical films having the longest trailers. While I was doing my study, another issue sprang to mind: how early do trailers come out?
I recall viewing the super-early teaser trailer for what would become the 1998 version of Godzilla as a teenager. Due to the fact that it was completed before the main movie had even been shot, the teaser trailer had a production budget of $600,000 and contained no footage from the final film! Teaser trailers are still plentiful, despite the rarity.
I focused on 1,000 movies released between 2000 and 2016, inclusive, using data from my prior trailer database and publicly available release statistics. I looked at the first internet trailer release date for each film and compared it to the film’s ultimate US theatrical release date.
The average duration between the first trailer as well as a theatrical release for these films was 126 days (i.e. around four months). Within six months of their theatrical debut, four-fifths of films received their initial trailer. Only 4.5 per cent of films had their debut trailer broadcast more than a year before they were released in theatres.
There were considerable variances per genre, with the first trailers focused on families and normally costly genres like adventure and fantasy being the most expensive. The first trailer for animated films was generally published 217 days before the film was released, compared to just 101 days for romance films.
I compiled my movie trailer dataset using a variety of public resources, including YouTube, Trailer Addict, Movie List, IMDb, and Wikipedia. I looked up theatrical release dates on IMDb and double-checked them with additional sites like The Numbers and Wikipedia. All trailers, including teaser trailers, were included as long as they contained more than simply a logo and the words “coming soon.”
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