The anticipation is killing me

By Tom van Steensel on 11 July 2011

Every time I walk out of a movie theatre I find myself asking the same questions. Are big Hollywood movies getting worse and worse in quality? Or do their crossmedial marketing campaigns just build up so much surrounding hype that it gets impossible for them not to disappoint?

The first time I asked those questions I tried to remember how I anticipated new movies back in the early nineties. I went to the cinema for the very first time in 1990 when I was six years old. When my parents stuffed me and a couple of my classmates into the car we knew only one thing about the movie we were going to see: the title. Prior to the showing I stood at the entrance admiring the movie poster for a good ten minutes. Back then movie posters also had three or four stills from the movie itself at the bottom of the design. That way you could already get a small glimpse of a couple of scenes you were about to see. Now how is that for anticipation?

The second time around (two years later) the process of anticipation consisted of looking at a review in a newspaper (remember those?) a few days in advance that included one single movie still. My family couldn’t afford a newspaper subscription, so I had to run to my grandmothers’ house to take a look at her copy. In the cinema itself movie trailers were also a highlight: I remember seeing a trailer for a new James Bond movie in the mid nineties, not knowing who Pierce Brosnan was, not even knowing MGM had green lit a new Bond movie. But as soon as I saw a secret agent shoot some Russians right before trashing St. Petersburg with an army tank followed by the tagline “you know the name, you know the number” I knew what the deal was.

Nowadays, things work a little differently and it has gotten more difficult to be surprised and impressed by a trailer like the aforementioned one. First I read about a movie and its director being announced on a website like Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. Then I head over to Aintitcoolnews and join dozens of other people in ranting on how studio executives could give such a high profile project to such a lacklustre director. Then I follow the entire casting process on sites like Coming soon and IMDB. Then, naturally, I use some more online message boards to badmouth the actors that have been cast thus far.

During the production of the movie I visit the official site to check out viral video’s, on set diary’s made by the director and also to listen to the first snippets of the soundtrack. I check twitter accounts of people involved to keep me updated on scenes that are being shot and changes that are being made to the script. During post-production I check out all the trailers and TV-spots (Super bowl time!) on several Internet sites. The next day I read a frame by frame (all right, that might be exaggerating, let’s go with shot by shot) trailer analysis in Empire magazine. Then I go back online to watch, rewind and rewatch the trailer to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Right before the movie comes out I read online reviews (by critics such as Richard Roeper and Roger Ebert) that I found trough sites like Metacritic and Rottentomatoes.

Eventually, it all ends with me buying a ticket, sitting in a seat for two hours and then uttering the phrase “meh, it’s not as good as I hoped it would be”. The funny thing is, nowadays I get more enjoyment out of the trajectory of anticipation than I get out of seeing the final product on screen. Even funnier: I don’t have to spend any money on the trajectory of anticipation, while movie tickets get more and more expensive due to new technical advancements like IMAX and 3D-screens. Mr. Lucas, mr. Spielberg, do you see the irony here?

tagged with: 3d, movies

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