Quick Programming note: Next week’s Monday Roundup will be published on Tuesday, since Labor Day is a U.S. national holiday.
Intro: A New Type of Ad
The first movie trailer ran in November 1913 and, somewhat ironically, advertised a Broadway show rather than a film. Screened at a handful of New York City movie theaters, the short promotional reel featured backstage footage from a musical called The Pleasure Seekers. The following year, this same formula was applied to an upcoming Charlie Chaplin film, teasing audiences with snippets of footage from an impending release. What began as a marketing stunt quickly became standard industry practice, and by 1917, the trade publication Moving Picture World declared that the trailer had “come into use extensively of late.”
More than a century later, trailers represent a thriving niche within the entertainment industry. Moviegoers routinely endure 25 minutes of previews before a screening (along with two insurance commercials), and major trailers rack up tens of millions of views online. Over the past five years, the prototypical studio film has released two trailers on average, while big-budget projects produce roughly five promotional spots over the course of an entire marketing campaign.
It’s with all this in mind that I’ll pose a rather annoying question: does this century-old marketing tool actually work? Do trailers meaningfully influence whether people buy movie tickets, or are they simply an expensive ritual Hollywood has never bothered to question?
So today, we’ll investigate Hollywood’s movie-trailer industrial complex and determine whether this lucrative cottage industry actually moves the needle.
Do Movie Trailers Actually Sell Tickets?
In 2012, a promo for Marvel’s Iron Man 3 set a YouTube record for video views within a trailer’s first 24 hours, garnering over 20 million plays. As you can imagine, this figure has since been surpassed several times over, with the current record holder being 2026’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which received nearly one billion views in its first 24 hours.
The Hollywood movie trailer has proven a natural fit for YouTube, where the average preview attracts tens of millions of views from internetgoers seeking a two-minute escape from boredom. Among videos that appear on YouTube’s daily Top 200 trending chart, movie trailers generate more collective viewership than any other content category.
People are watching these things, racking up billions of hours of viewership, which begs an uncomfortable question: does any of this matter? Are trailers the entertainment in and of themselves, or does this attention actually translate into box office?
To this, I say: ¿Por qué no los dos? (Translation: Why not both?)
To start with the simplest view, there appears to be a meaningful correlation between YouTube trailer views and a film’s worldwide box office gross.
If we’re willing to accept that correlation equates to causation, then we can wrap up this analysis early. One pretty cool chart, one thoroughly answered question, and absolutely no gray area or ambiguity surrounding this topic.
Just kidding—if only it were so simple! The apparent relationship between YouTube trailer views and box-office performance is muddied by a major confounding factor: film budget. Bigger movies tend to spend more on marketing, rack up more trailer views, and earn more at the box office.
The higher the profile of a film, especially one that is connected to existing intellectual property, the more ravenously its trailer is consumed. A promo for a third-rate franchise like Masters of the Universe garners greater YouTube activity than, say, a dirt-cheap A24 movie.
If a studio spends heavily to produce a film, it will also spend heavily to promote it. So how do we separate a movie’s budget from its trailer’s effectiveness?
One approach is to rerun this correlation exercise, grouping our key metric by budget cohort. For this view, we’ll look at two different trailer-centric statistics:
Trailer views: pre-release video plays, as reported by YouTube.
Trailer “like rate”: the share of YouTube viewers who give a trailer a thumbs-up.
The results suggest that raw trailer views matter most for lower-budget films and considerably less for blockbuster releases. Trailer “like rate,” meanwhile, shows a stronger correlation with box-office performance across all budget tiers, which makes intuitive sense: the more audiences like what they see, the more likely they are to buy a ticket.
For an indie film, online enthusiasm is evidence that the movie has broken through the noise and found an audience. An expensive franchise release, by contrast, already comes with built-in awareness; its trailer simply has to convince people that the latest installment won’t be bad.
Putting it all together, we can run numerous variables through a regression model to see how factors like promo views, trailer “like rate,” and online acclaim predict box-office performance, both on their own and when combined.
The unsatisfying answer is that no single metric determines whether a movie succeeds. Instead, box-office performance appears to depend on an alchemical mix of factors, including:
Budget
Online acclaim (the quality of the filmmaking)
Whether the trailer was well-received (“like rate”)
Whether the trailer was able to generate hype, in the form of mass YouTube consumption
Each factor explains some portion of a film’s commercial performance, but the model becomes far more predictive when it considers how those variables interact.
In summary, I’m happy to report that movie trailers are indeed worth it, especially for smaller films that benefit from the kind of algorithmic kismet only YouTube can provide.
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Final Thoughts: The Best Type of Advertisement
At its most basic, the movie trailer is a glorified commercial, its intended purpose no different from a State Farm ad or a Disneyland promo. But consider this admittedly unrealistic thought experiment: what would we lose if movie trailers ceased to exist?
For Disney or State Farm, fewer commercials would mean less brand awareness and, eventually, lower sales. Q3 earnings might suffer, and few people outside Wall Street would care. But if movies lost the trailer, the consequences would extend beyond a simple decline in ticket sales.
When I was eleven, I became obsessed with movies. There were countless things that drew me in, but what I found most enticing was the idea of a broader movie culture. I loved that there was a historical lineage of films just sitting there, waiting to be watched. I loved the common language cinephiles used to talk about flops, cult classics, and six degrees of Kevin Bacon. And I loved watching movie trailers.
During my early internet years, I scoured IMDb and YouTube for promos. It didn’t matter whether the trailer was for an upcoming blockbuster or some forgotten movie from the 1970s. I would watch them all the same.
I admit that everything about this next sentence reeks of personal bias, but movie trailers—which are just extended commercials—may be the only form of advertising that transcends its primary purpose.
Which raises an intriguing question: when is an ad more than just an ad?
When a meaningful portion of the moviegoing public shows up early to a screening because they “like the trailers.”
When thousands of people dissect a two-minute advertisement on Reddit, trying to determine whether the movie will be any good, make any money, win any awards, or somehow manage all three.
When I consciously decide not to see a movie but am still glad I watched the trailer because now I understand what everyone else is talking about.
YouTube has allowed this culture to flourish far beyond the theater. Yesterday, for example, I watched two trailers online: one for an artsy Oscar contender called Fjord and another for a follow-up to The Social Network called The Social Reckoning. The first convinced me to buy a ticket. The second looked heinous, likely to besmirch the legacy of my favorite movie.
At the most immediate level, these trailers accomplished exactly what advertising is supposed to accomplish: they influenced a purchasing decision. But a few hours later, I was still thinking about both of them. People online were still chattering about how terrible The Social Reckoning looked, and reading those reactions made me feel both pleased and seen.
That experience captures both the measurable and intangible value of a movie trailer. On one level, I made a straightforward consumer decision based on whether I liked an advertisement—like all the other data points featured in my charts. In the other instance, a trailer gave me something to think about, argue about, anticipate, and discuss with a community of movie-lovers (and in this case, I guess, -haters).
Perhaps that is what captivated those original trailer audiences more than a century ago. A trailer does more than sell the experience of watching a movie. It allows the prospect of that movie to live rent-free in your head long before the lights go down and long after that film leaves theaters.
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Question - I'm no making-money-off-YouTube expert, but perhaps the studios are also considering the fact they can monetize their trailers that rack up millions of views on there, no? Maybe for some of these trailers they break even.
Interesting, thanks. Given budget is a likely confounder (influencing both trailer views and success, contributing to a non-causal correlation) it would be useful to see an estimate of the effect of trailer views on outcome adjusting for budget. And, even better, having this without the trailer marketing budget (which would mean budget causing success through the trailer as mediator)