There was a time in my life when I would experience a movie in a theater without ever having seen a trailer for it. I was living in Australia and that time introduced me to seeing a film without any preconceptions. Movie trailers have always been notorious for giving away the entire plot of a film in their quest to sell it. But they are harder and harder to avoid thanks to YouTube.
This week, some moviegoers had an inverted experience of this … seeing a movie that didn’t seem to match the trailer they had watched beforehand. Apparently, movie trailers for the new film Mean Girls spend two minutes showing scenes from the film yet none of them reveal a fundamental fact about the movie: it is a musical. It seems this is disturbing for about one quarter of moviegoers who are so put off by not knowing this detail ahead of time that they are taking their outrage online.
It’s a sad reality when some of us are so conditioned to get what we expect that any small surprise sends us into a tailspin. What happened to the beautiful ignorance of not knowing what happens next in a film or otherwise?