Indy’s hat on the ground outside a car surrounded by Communist soldiers in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Beyond genre and story, stars are the most important part of a legacyquel’s marketing because the returning actors reprising their famous roles validate the legacyquel’s legitimacy even more than the character’s return does on its own. But that is only half of the importance stars bring to the legacyquel. As Kernan asserts, “The rhetoric of stardom is the only one of the three forms of appeal that relies on a feature of the film that possesses an indexical relationship to the social world.”[i] Stars are who they are, they have innate characteristics, and modern audiences care more than ever that the films they see feature different kinds of people than have been traditionally at the forefront of the kinds of movies that have legacyquels. There is, once again, a balance that most legacyquel trailer editors must control between selling the film on the backs of the older, returning stars and advertising the newer, younger stars who will take either prominent or secondary roles based on what the film is doing with its returning star(s). Rely too much on the returning stars and risk irrelevance to new audiences, while too much focus on new stars can have the returning stars and their devoted audiences feeling unsatisfied. Either of these outcomes leads to less excitement for the new legacyquel and more chance that it will be irrelevant rather than a true revitalization of the franchise in question.

There is one major problem that legacyquel trailer editors face: the fact that all of the returning stars will be older and therefore, in a youth-obsessed industry, less valuable than they used to be. However, as a counterbalance, the legacyquel came to prominence in a time when pre-established intellectual property is Hollywood’s biggest selling point for blockbuster franchises that make up the majority of legacyquel production. This focus on IP-based franchises has lead to a sense that stars matter less than ever, and when Marvel opens a new superhero film with a relative unknown like Chris Hemsworth or Simu Liu at the center of it, the notion can seem inescapable. The legacyquel, nevertheless, reminds us that actors (and stars in particular) are still crucial parts of selling a film. One need only look at the two 2010s portrayals of Han Solo to see what a returning star means to a film.

After the huge success of Harrison Ford’s return to the role in The Force Awakens, Disney greenlit a Han Solo prequel film clearly meant to be the first in the series given how much setup for a larger conflict occurs in the final act. But Alden Ehrenreich’s performance in the role drew criticism for both being too imitative and not close enough to Ford’s unique swagger. In studying what stars bring to the films they star in, Richard Dyer finds that it is “the repeated use, within films and through the films of a star’s career, of certain mannerisms, which do the job of personalizing the type the performer plays. These may be relatively ‘naturalistic’ mannerisms, but they are different and repeated enough to constitute idiosyncrasies. These form the basis of the individual star’s performance style.”[ii] Harrison Ford’s star image, reliant upon a delicate balance of being coolly aloof until he gets in way over his head at which point he becomes manically over-the-top, is very difficult to imitate. It’s in his sighs, his gait, even his mouth bouncing back and forth between a wry smile and an intense grimace that the Harrison Ford ‘thing’ becomes apparent. Audiences saw that star image develop over the course of numerous films, including Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Blade Runner, each of which eventually received a legacyquel where much of the draw was his return as Han Solo, Jones, and Rick Deckard. These legacyquels, however, had to sell him in different ways and took different approaches to his aged appearance.

In the Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s first trailer a full half of the runtime is dedicated to reestablishing not Ford as Jones but Jones the character via recurring iconography like his hat, whip, and even khaki slacks. Before any new footage is shown, viewers are reminded of all of the prior adventures Indy had via iconic shots taken from all three previous films. The trailer editors chose to hide Ford’s face and instead relied at first upon the aspects of the character that didn’t age, up to and including his silhouette. The first full face reveal of Ford features the dialogue “This won’t be easy,” to which Ford responds “Not as easy as it used to be.” This dialogue in combination with his older, more wrinkled face and grey hair and stubble indicates the pose the film will take with the character of acknowledging his aged body and allowing Ford to play the character with a bit more hesitation and bemused slowness. Based on this trailer and, indeed, in the full film, Indy seemingly isn’t much different from how he was the last time audiences saw him in 1989, he’s still a professor and adventurer, he can still do all of the same kinds of stunts he did in those earlier films. He’s just a little slower at it and the trailer editors (and filmmakers) are smart enough to know that this should be acknowledged and even poked fun at. In this way, a sense of continuity is reestablished and audiences are promised that their favorite history professor will be up to his old tricks again, no matter the time that has passed since last they saw him.

The return of an actor as a beloved character doesn’t just reinforce the desire to see that beloved actor but also revives the whole world they once inhabited. The full trailer for The Force Awakens uses Ford in this way as he once again comes in halfway through to briefly appear onscreen and give a voiceover that carries through the next minute or so of the trailer. In his brief appearance audiences are again reminded of his iconic look, leather jacket over white shirt, now replete with grey hair and stubble. His shoulders are more hunched by age than pulled back in Han Solo’s laconic style. And yet, this is Han Solo, no doubt. His presence starts to confirm the importance and even reality of the Star Wars universe, and his voice over continues this work as he says in response to Rey asking about the stories of what happened earlier, “It’s true, all of it. The dark side. The jedi. They’re real.” Here Ford’s gravely voice is used to impart even greater gravitas as he reaffirms both the “reality” and importance of the prior films he was in. Over the course of those films Han Solo went from loner skeptic to rebel leader and best friend to the most powerful man in the galaxy, so having him here say words he once tossed off as a joke like “the dark side” and “jedi” with the kind of near-religious weight some audiences feel for them not only confirms that this new film is indeed a direct sequel to those, it confirms for audiences familiar with these concepts and his prior disapproval of them that they were right to care about them. It’s not just the lines he’s saying, it’s the fact that it’s him saying them the way that he does that makes this such an effective marketing strategy. It speaks to not only his return but the return of the whole storyworld that audiences loved the first time around.

As trailer editors for legacyquels have shown in the prior two trailers examined, there are many possible combinations of prior iconic imagery and new footage, especially when mixed with the score associated with the famous films and characters that preceded the legacyquel and will return in it. There is, however, yet more possible ways to leverage the returning star, which is to create an aural contrast between the past and present. The announcement trailer for Blade Runner 2049 achieves this by playing Ford’s lines from the original film over new footage of Ryan Gosling walking around in the 30-year-later future world of Blade Runner. Ford’s lines are not the most famous, but they adequately set up what a Blade Runner is and reminds audiences of what his character was like, especially as they play over a man who looks a lot like the younger Ford in silhouette (which is mostly how he is shown). “Replicants are like any other machine” Ford says from the past, “they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit it’s not my problem.” These lines appearing in this trailer might have been the only appearance of Ford in the entire marketing and finished film and they’d be effective in setting up the stakes and continuity of the film. The trailer (and filmmakers) is not yet done with him, though, as he returns later in the trailer once again aged with grey hair and stubble. He speaks a few more lines and their content is not as important as the juxtaposition between his prior lines reused from the original film and the lines from this new one where his voice is noticeably more gruff and somehow even more mumbled. Ford has not only visibly aged but audibly as well. Each of these three films use Ford’s aged appearance and way of being in the world to great effect as they contain reflections on the passage of time and the change that has happened within the storyworld offscreen via his character and others. Whether it is through juxtapositions of visual or aural elements from prior films to the new films or the actor/character saying lines that directly affirm the connection between the old and new, legacyquel trailers rely on the returning stars to entice audiences to the theater to experience their old favorites once again.

[i] Ibid., 63.

[ii] Dyer, Richard. Stars. New Edition. London: British Film Institute, 1998.

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.

Rocky and Adonis Creed prepare to fight in Creed

Legacyquels most frequently appear within genre franchises. Indeed, the only legacyquel I have found that doesn’t fit into the sci-fi, horror, action, sports, or romance genres is Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½, a sequel to the first film with the same name made 35+ years prior to its release in 2005. William Greaves’ films deliberately eschew genre and filmmaking mode boundaries, mixing documentary and fiction, romance and social revolution. Nearly every other legacyquel-bearing series/franchise can be painted with some broad genre brush, from Star Wars to Rocky/Creed and the Before series, each film slots neatly into a genre category that can be listed on a streaming service’s platform.

As films in a series rarely shift genres and legacyquels even more rarely change this element, being sold as a continuation of a thing audiences loved some time ago returning triumphantly to the big screen, the genre aspect of a legacyquel trailer becomes a two-part sales technique. First, it reminds the viewer familiar with the series what specific genre pleasures can be had within this series of films as an enticement to return when the film debuts. Secondly, it shows a newer, updated vision of the generic world contained within the original film as a promise to new audiences that this film will be just as visually rewarding as the other films within this genre released at this time. The balance between reminding audiences of the past, promising more of that, and ensuring those unfamiliar with the series that it will not be an outdated dinosaur of a movie (with the exception of the Jurassic Park/World series, of course) is crucial to the advertising of the legacyquel film.

While makers of traditional sequel trailers can rest relatively sure that the audience is in fact anticipating a new entry in a series that is ongoing, legacyquel trailer makers face a different set of audience expectations altogether. Kernan asserts that “The rhetorical logic of sequel and cycle trailers entails a textual demonstration of the producers’ knowledge that audiences liked the original film by asserting in the sequel trailer their desire to make another one like it, which in turn creates an assumption that audiences will want to come to see the latest episode or version since they are assumed to have liked the first one.”[i] While this may be true of traditional sequel trailers, the legacyquel trailer must first remind audiences of why they went to see the original films in the first place and reignite any passion they might have for the series. One of their biggest tools for such a reignition is the generic world that was originally crafted in the prior entries in the series.

The Force Awakens’s teaser trailer accomplishes this task while featuring very little dialogue outside of a voiceover by an unknown (but seemingly evil based on intonation and, in the full film, revealed to be the villainous Snoke) person talking about “an awakening,” asking (audiences) “Have you felt it?” This short bit of dialogue plays out over images of each of the new protagonists in familiar locations. There’s Finn in his stormtrooper uniform—sans helmet—popping up in a desert reminiscent of the first film’s Tatooine, Rey in a similar locale but with a floating bike reminiscent of Luke’s speeder in A New Hope, BB-8 traversing what seems like a shipyard, Poe in an X-Wing cockpit decked out in a very familiar Rebel uniform, and Kylo Ren walking into a snow-filled forest before igniting a red lightsaber indicating he’s going to be a villain. The final “character” who gets an introduction in this brief trailer is the Millennium Falcon, the disc-shaped ship that the heroes of the first films flew around the galaxy far, far away. We not only see this familiar sight but hear the familiar sound of the Falcon’s whining engines as well, ensuring audiences that this is the same old ship they’ve grown to know intimately over the course of the prior entries in the series. But it is not only the ship who is returning based on this trailer, it is the world of Star Wars that is being reasserted here.

Kernan suggest that “the most obvious way that many trailers invoke specific genres is through iconography. Those trailers with strong genre appeals will often underline familiar generic iconography by presenting it in hyperbolic fashion.” When the film is part of a series that genre appeal through iconography can be even more directly tuned to a series appeal. The specific genre pleasures associated with the prior entries in the series are revisited in legacyquel trailers to remind audiences of what they enjoyed about the original film(s)’s take on the genre in question. Star Wars famously rethought science fiction to emphasize its real-world grime and disrepair while exoticizing space travel as a journey between planets with giant, singular biomes (desert, swamp, forest, etc.), traits that seem to carry over in this teaser for the series’ first legacyquel entry alongside the more obvious iconography of the lightsaber, ship designs, and even John Williams’ score playing over all of these familiar image.

This Star Wars teaser, however, also fulfills the other genre expectation based on the desires of audiences unfamiliar with the series to see a film based in a certain genre and providing the kinds of pleasures they expect to see in films of that genre in their contemporary moment. It is unlikely that even audiences unfamiliar with the original Star Wars films would be entirely ignorant of the series iconography, so stuff like the lightsabers and Millennium Falcon would probably perform some kind of signification even for these newer audiences being courted by this trailer. But more important is how they are deployed.

Kylo Ren and Rey fight with lightsabers in The Force Awakens

Everything in this trailer is dynamically shot to achieve maximum effect. Part of this comes from director JJ Abrams’ distinctive visual style which emphasizes alacrity in both action and performance. No stormtrooper had ever popped up into the frame the way Finn does in the trailer’s first shot (nor have they ever had their helmets off). Rey’s hoverbike is shot from near ground level and in a quick pan that calls attention to the speed of her driving. BB-8 is a ball and thus rolls swiftly along the bumpy desert ground it is traversing while whistle-and-booping in an echo of R2-D2’s mode of communication even as the trailer asserts this is a new evolution of droid given its speed. The shot of Poe’s X-Wing (and the other two accompanying him) shakes vertically as if the camera capturing the footage is strapped to an equally fast ship. Kylo Ren’s lightsaber is unlike any other, rattling with almost uncontainable energy and featuring two exhaust vents that give it a look more like European swords than the katanas the original sabers were based on.

And, perhaps most importantly, we do not get an introduction to the Falcon in a typical flying situation. Instead, the shot we see of the Falcon is perhaps the most visually dynamic shot of the entire series as it follows the ship while it does a near-planet loop and skims along the surface of the desert we’ve seen throughout the trailer. The original Star Wars films, as groundbreaking and impressive as they were for their recreation of WWII-film-influenced ship battles rather than the relatively staid naval-warfare-influenced Star Trek battles, were simply unable to capture such visual dynamism in their ship-based action scenes. In the time between 1977 and the release of this trailer in 2014, CGI had become the dominant force in special effects rather than the miniatures that were primarily used in the original trilogy. The Star Wars prequels featured faster and more dynamic action scenes thanks to their CGI, but those were still formally locked down in ways that retained their status as homage to the WWII plane battles Lucas was originally inspired by. In other words, those space battles happened faster and featured more dynamic movement but weren’t filmed much differently than the battles in the original trilogy.

The Millennium Falcon flies at TIE Fighters in The Force Awakens

However, Abrams brought to the series a perspective inspired not by WWII films but by the videogames made about those prequel trilogy films, particularly the Rogue Squadron games that placed players in cockpits of the series’ ships for fast-paced dogfights and space battles. Offering first-person, in-cockpit views and third-person, behind-the-ship perspectives to play from, the games were well-reviewed for finally capturing the feeling of piloting these ships and giving players a unique, dynamic experience of these ships more intimate than any seen in the preceding films. So when Abrams, influenced by these games and the news coverage of modern warfare that featured on-the-ground filmed footage that also inspired takes on space fighting like those seen in the Battlestar Galactica tv show with its quick zooms and “handheld” imitation, directed the action and the placement of the CG “camera” within these ship action scenes he did so more freely and in such a way as to highlight the incredible agility, speed, and acrobatic nature of the ships and those piloting them. This is this trailer’s greatest appeal to new fans: our space action is going to be next level stuff. It will fit into (and exceed) your expectations for a sci-fi action film and a Star Wars film at the same time.

[i] Ibid., 50.

Han and Chewie in Star Wars – Episode VII: The Force Awakens

The first online mention of the legacyquel came in the form of Matt Singer’s article “Welcome to the Age of the Legacyquel.” It was written in response to the Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens’ first full trailer, and Singer begins by writing that “It’s rare for a movie trailer to give [him] chills. But the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens did.”[i] As paratexts for films, trailers aren’t often the subject of much consideration other than the brief bursts of excitement or dread they invoke within their watchers, sometimes expressed as hyperbolic responses in twitter threads or reddit posts. However, as the industry has moved toward not only the kinds of big-budget movies that are preceded by a half-dozen different trailers but also the kinds of franchise-driven decision-making that makes trailers a key paratext to position the film among an ever-expanding constellation of tie-ins and off-shoots, the trailer becomes a key part of the marketing and even creative output in relation to the movie it is advertising. Legacyquel trailers in particular become a crucial part of the audience’s understanding of the films they advertise as they aim to both reignite the fan-ish feelings audience members have or had about the previous entries in the franchise while they also try to draw in new audience members promising an experience that is in line with modern filmmaking styles and concerns.

Lisa Kernan reminds us that in addition to their advertising function trailers “are also a unique form of narrative film exhibition, wherein promotional discourse and narrative pleasure are combined.”[ii] Indeed, the stories film trailers tell are oddly among the industry’s most popular, far outreaching the actual audience for any given film. Their twofold job, to sell a filmic experience and to do so by providing, however misleading, a bite-sized version of that experience and story, makes them a vital location for understanding how Hollywood conceives of their products and the audiences to whom they sell that product.

Following Kernan and using her framework, I will examine the “unique and specific rhetorical structures that fold visual and auditory evidence of the film production industry’s assessment of its actual audience (as well as its desires for a potential audience”[iii] in legacyquel trailers, particularly her understanding of the “three principal textual features of films: genres, stories, and stars” within the additional constraints and affordances of the legacyquel storytelling tropes. Each of these three elements of film trailers gains an extra valence of nostalgic energy within legacyquel trailers as their editors work to blend old audiences with the new. As Kernan notes, “Different markets are made visible in trailers by textual evidence of ‘targeting,’ or appeals to specific genders, age groups, or other categories of subjectivity within trailers’ overall mission to expand the audience.”[iv] In the trailers for legacyquels those targeted appeals are balanced between reminding existing fans of their attachment to the story, characters, and actors involved in the series prior to the new entry and exciting potential new audience members with the promise of an intelligible entrypoint into the franchise usually through the method of new, younger stars/characters, often in the form of a more diverse cast than previous entries as well. This diversity appeals to the desire in current audiences to see a broader representation of races, genders, and sexualities on screen, especially in the blockbuster spaces where characters of minoritized backgrounds were often absent or shunted to sidekick and love interest roles. (INSERT REFERENCE TO BLOCKBUSTER BOOK HERE). Like the movies they are made to sell, legacyquel trailers speak to a dual audience and sell the promise of a newer, more diverse vision of the franchise they are attached to while promising that things haven’t changed too much via the presence of the older characters and their returning actors.

[i] Singer, Matt. “Welcome to the Age of the Legacyquel.” Media Journalism. Screen Crush, November 23, 2015. https://screencrush.com/the-age-of-legacyquels/.

[ii] Kernan, Lisa. Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Texas Film and Media Series. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004, 1.

[iii] Ibid., 3.

[iv] Ibid., 14-15.