The rear end of the Ecto-1 from the teaser for Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Legacyquel trailers rely upon the same kinds of story rhetorics as do normal film trailers, albeit with some additional standardized moves. As Kernan states, “The rhetoric of story deals with assumptions trailers make about what kinds of experiences audiences want to watch unfold and narrative time, and what kinds of knowledge they desire to gain at the movies.”[i] Modern trailer makers tend to assume that audiences want to see some indication of the story they will experience within the full film without revealing too much. Usually they will sketch out a rough plotline through the first half of a film in a trailer and occasionally they will use imagery from later in the film divorced from the context of such images. The assumption Kernan outlines suggests that one of the main pleasures of seeing a movie is the experience of an unfolding story such that audiences ooh and ahh in all the right places, gasp at reveals and cheer at victories. The trailer then must be delicately balanced so as to entice audiences by revealing just enough of the story to get audiences interested without giving away those moments (or the predecessors to those moments that would indicate what those moments will likely be) that will make the moviegoing experience a memorable one.
Kernan, writing in 2004, is additionally attuned to the way that movie trailers try to sell the necessity of experiencing the film in question theatrically, a necessity that has become even more urgent as of the writing of this essay in the end of 2021 when movie theaters and film distributors are trying to regain ground lost to streaming services during the (still ongoing) pandemic. She writes that, “The overall message of the rhetoric of story could be expressed thus: ‘You would like to experience these events – at the movies.’ Movies, in other words, aren’t just like ordinary experience […], but at times provide safe opportunities to experience events narratively that audiences might avoid, fear or for other reasons not experience outside the movie theater.”[ii] The legacyquel trailer extends the rhetoric of story as outlined by Kernan as they seek to entice audiences old and new to the theater to experience the full stories to which they refer.
The legacyquel trailer doesn’t have the same job as most trailers do. As I wrote above, the trailer must attract audiences already familiar with the series to which they seek to add a new entry and audiences unfamiliar with the previous entries. As such, legacyquels tend to have one of two story structures depending on whether the protagonist of the original films will continue to be the protagonist of the new film or if they will instead fulfill a supporting role. In the first case, the films and therefore their accompanying trailers will lead with the returning protagonist prominently featured and the trailer will sell the premise that the character, now older and more experienced, will have to face new problems and encounter new characters who will help or harm them. Examples of this can be seen in the cases of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Matrix: Ressurections, both of which had trailers that heavily feature the returning protagonists and take great pains to note how long it has been since audiences had seen those characters. In the second case, the films tend to hold the returning characters back for anywhere between a few scenes and an act or two. With these kinds of legacyquels, the new characters take on the primary roles and the returning characters act most frequently as mentors, often not showing up until the end of the first act or even as deep as the end of the second act of the film. Because these characters are meant to be a reveal to the audience, their presence is often not centered in the trailers for the films in question. However, since their presence is so essential to the validity of this sequel as being directly connected to the prior entries, the trailers for these kinds of films must either hint heavily at the eventual appearance of the returning characters via glimpses at familiar costuming, iconic associated props or locations, and perhaps a name drop.
The teaser trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife consists of only two shots: a wide shot of a mysterious barn and a growing storm above it, and a low tracking shot going into the barn which ends with a crackle of proton-pack energy and a billowing car cover lifting just enough to show the rear end of the Ecto-1, the iconic ghostbusting vehicle from the original films. The full trailer, released almost a year later, focuses almost entirely on the new characters, a family that moves into a run down house “in the middle of nowhere” full of props familiar to returning audiences like the PK meter, ghost trap, proton pack, and, again, the Ecto-1. But the full trailer doesn’t need to rely just on the props, it also features old footage from the original Ghostbusters film in the guise of a YouTube video of “news footage” of the old gang following their defeat of Gozer. Along with mysterious mentions of a father/grandfather who had abandoned the family long ago, the suspiciously round spectacles and big curly hair of the two kids in the family, and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse at a Ghostbuster uniform with the nametag “Spengler,” audiences began to put the pieces together. The final puzzle piece is the reuse of a line from the original Ghostbusters film, “For whatever reasons, call it fate, call it karma. I believe everything happens for a reason” spoken by an older man. The Ghostbusters: Afterlife trailers do not reveal that any character other than Aykroyd’s returns and even then audiences only hear his voice over a phone. Because the reveal of most of the original characters only happens at the climax of the new film the trailers go out of their way to hide the original Ghostbusters the same way the movie does, only hinting here and there at revelations that will eventually be made late in the full film. These hints speak to returning audiences and engage in what Jason Mittell calls forensic fandom, a kind of fan engagement that sees artists and subsequently trailer editors hiding clues about the mysteries contained within the full work for people to speculate, write, and make YouTube videos about, explaining the 5 hidden references you missed in the trailer.
Most legacyquels, however, don’t either feature the protagonist returning in the main role of the new movie nor do they keep the returning characters hidden until the climax of the latest entry. Instead, most returning characters are introduced somewhere between the end of the first act and the end of the second. Here they’ll be able to help the new protagonists navigate difficulties similar to those they navigated in the earlier entries in the franchise. These entrypoints give audiences enough time to fully invest in the new characters before the reveal that they live in a world shared by (now older) prior protagonists who will take the new characters under their wing.
The delayed entries also align with where trailer editors usually stop showing narrative progression in trailers. Trailer editors will usually save the reveal of the returning character for over a minute and will usually not show much beyond the introduction of the returning character and an offer or ask of support. The first Creed trailer saves the reveal of Sylvester Stallone’s return as Rocky Balboa for a full minute and a half, and the first shot of him is actually a picture of his fight with Apollo Creed from the first Rocky film. Before that the trailer focuses heavily on Adonis Creed, though it doesn’t mention his name and the brief mention of his father who died in the ring is brushed off as something that might have happened to any boxer. Indeed, the first half of this trailer goes out of its way to hide that it is a legacyquel to the Rocky series before revealing Stallone’s Rocky who offers to train the younger Creed.
Whether the trailer is for a legacyquel with a protagonist returning in the main role or as a mentor/supporting character, the trailer still needs to sell the film on a story about an older character teaming up with a younger one in some way, as that is the core conceit of almost all legacyquel films. The story of a young person learning from an elder is common in the kinds of series that get legacyquels, and indeed most of the original films legacyquels are based on shared this kind of character dynamic, whether it was Obi-wan and Luke in Star Wars or Rocky and Mickey in the Rocky films. In this way, the legacyquel marketing needn’t be much different from a standard trailer in these genres. Instead, they can focus on the particularly cinematic aspects of these stories. As the Creed trailer demonstrates, being able to refer to or even visually show scenes and moments from the original films can be an effective reminder of the thrills those films provided audiences as theatrical experiences. The black-and-white photograph of the iconic Rocky/Creed fight from the first Rocky film recalls the event of watching that fight play out for those who had seen the film and as a bit of backstory for those who are new to the franchise. Either way, it sells the monumental nature of that fight, its iconicity not just as a visual bit of excitement but also as perhaps the defining moment for the Rocky character who famously loses in a moment that still somehow feels like a triumph. The picture, even as a small framed photo on a wall, is a stand-in for the event-like nature of going to see a movie like Rocky in a theater, and a promise that this new film, Creed, will be similarly exciting to watch unfold. The trailer editors have done their job to show just how similar but also importantly different (more on this in the next section) Creed is from Rocky by selling him as an underdog just like Rocky was with an aesthetic updating in the filmmaking as discussed in the prior section.
The purpose here is to not only sell audiences on watching the film eventually but on watching it in a movie theater. During the second stage of the Covid-19 pandemic this kind of theatrical drive has become even stronger as trailers go out of their way to say that the upcoming film is premiering “Only in theaters” to distinguish them from those few that have day-and-date releases on a home streaming platform like all 2021 Warner Bros. releases including The Matrix: Ressurrections and Disney’s MCU prequel Black Widow. Here the rhetoric of the necessity of experiencing these stories in a theater becomes not just a promise of excitement and novelty but also exclusivity. Spider-Man: No Way Home will feature returning villains and Peter Parkers from the previous two theatrical Spider-Man franchises via a multi-dimensional warp in Marvel’s first semi-legacyquel and its trailer touts that you’ll only be able to see such sights in a movie theater to try to juice the audience levels back to pre-pandemic levels. Now that the streaming cat is out of the proverbial bag, expect such explicit marketing terms to stick around as trailer editors continue to entice audiences via slightly more subtle means.
[i] Ibid., 53.
[ii] Ibid., 53-54.