We all needed something to look forward to in 2020. That’s what movie trailers provide, isn’t it? They’re a glimpse at the fun you’ll have down the road, a save-the-date card, a circle to draw on your calendar. In a year almost entirely devoid of blockbusters, we had to make do with trailers: They offered scraps of spectacle to tide everyone over, and maybe to remind us all that the big movies (and the theaters showing them) would be back eventually. Which is not to say that all of the best trailers of this long, dark year were for the giant Hollywood extravaganzas yanked off the calendar when the pandemic made communal entertainment a thing of the past and (hopefully) future. Nor did every great trailer that dropped in 2020 advertise a movie we’ll now have wait until 2021 to see. But no matter the size or ultimate release date of the films themselves, the little pressurized marketing montages designed to get us excited about them felt, for once, like more than just sales pitches. They were like glimmers of a brighter future. And the 10 that follow shined brightly indeed.
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2020 will be remembered as the year where the #1 movie in America (38 straight weeks and counting!) was “any four consecutive episodes of The Office.”
Also worth noting- these slideshows are absolutely garbage.
DUNE trailer didn’t even make your list. Huh.
Perhaps the Dune trailer found out AVClub was presenting this as a slideshow and refused to participate. If so, great choice on its part.
That Dune trailer was powerful and majestic. I’m not even a dune fan, and that trailer stuck with me. The use of Pink Floyd as a choir cover was ingenious.
I forgot about “I’m Thinking About Ending Things.” Thanks for the reminder to watch that.
Slideshows: bad. Batman trailer? Good. Green Knight? Goood. French Dispatch? Good? Dune?
The trailer for The Batman really felt underwhelming to me. I’m so fucking tired of the Darkness No Parents aesthetic surrounding mainstream Batman movies. Like, there are other Batman stories than Long Halloween, DKR, Year One, and the Killing Joke. There are people who claim Marvel movies are somehow “All the same!”. Yet nearly every single mainstream Batman movie since 2005 has had the same grim and gritty aesthetic.
Yeah, same here. When this was first announced, and the buzz that it would lean more into the “detective” aspect of Batman’s mythology, I was interested … but this literally looks like a Nolan retread with different actors.
To be fair, at that point they’d probably filmed about 20% of the film before being shut down. I’m surprised they managed to get a coherent trailer together that early into production with so little to choose from . Either way, there’s still plenty more film to be made so I’m hopeful.
Um, the three Batman films that were done in that time frame all had the same director, so yeah, I’d expect the aesthetic to track across them.That said, as PGThirteen said, I’m still waiting for the detective-ness of this movie to show up. Then again, how much of that can come across in a trailer…
Batman seems to be the epicenter of it, but I was thinking today about how colors seems to be a thing of the past, in cinema. I often joke that we can never remember whether a Melville movie was in color or in black and white, but it’s the case with every film nowadays. If there’s a Connery or Moore James Bond on tv tonight, you can expect colors, if it’s a Craig one, expect blue and black and black and dark blue and black. That and every scene in every movie or tv series having half the faces covered in pitch black shadows, wherever the location (outside, inside), wherever the luminosity. All is desaturated, all is in darkness, it’s like everything is seen through a manic depressive eye because oh how would it look realistic and dark and gretty and serious and mature and bleak and grown up without that.And Dune. Dune but without the sun. Because.
Casino Royale was a very colorful, exciting movie. Can’t necessarily say the same about the diminishing returns of all the rest of craig’s bond movies, but they all have their moments
It’s hard to remember because of the shakey cam, but I think a lot of Quantum of Solace takes place in the desert. And the dominat image I think of from Skyfall is Javier Barden’s bleached hair and light suit. Even No Time to Die looks bright and shiny. Darkness was mainly and issue in Spectre to me, but otherwise I think Craig’s movies have had a fair amount of colour to them.
Both kinds of colours exist in modern cinema, both orange and teal.
Speaking of DC, if the first Wonder Woman 1984 trailer didn’t make it last year (like Tenet it was released in December) then it deserved a slot here. That aesthetic set to that version of Blue Monday was fantastic – I wasn’t too fussed about the first film but watched that trailer multiple times.
It really was a perfect trailer. Am kind of psyched to see Kristin Wiig as a comic book villain.
Between her and Pedro Pascal playing a slimy businessman – and their teaming up – I’m getting Batman Returns vibes with Pascal as a cross between The Penguin and Max Schrek. And that’s no bad thing.
I wonder if this means The Batman was pushed into 2022. I thought for sure it was slated for 2021 but it’s not on the list of WB movies at Warner is releasing day and date on HBO Max.
I hadn’t seen the Green Knight or Boys State one, both are quite good.
I watched Time a couple weeks ago without seeing the trailer, but you’re right in your assessment of the trailer. The movie is still my pick for Best Editing this year.
Dune was the best of the big budget trailers I saw this year, as best I can recall.
Extremely curious to know how Dune got omitted here. I’m sure there’s a lot to pick apart but each time I watched the Dune trailer and was left cheering AND starving for more. Isn’t that what a trailer aspires to?
No Dune? I thought that was a great trailer.
I thought the Avclub wasn’t a content farm yet
The herbs are slowly turning the heat up, to see if we’ll notice by the time it gets boiling.
Hit ‘pause’ on the other cast member listed for French Dispatch. Anderson’s basically assembled everyone who’s ever worked for him, plus some new ones. This looks really fun.
I know this was technically a trailer from last year but the movie’s coming out this year so I’ll stump for the Promising Young Woman trailer. That string quartet arrangement of “Toxic” fucking slaps.
What, no Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar?Said with the absolute maximum possible sarcasm.
Sidenote: I did Boys State in high school one summer. It was a fucking nightmare.
Good list. After having my doubts, I loved what I saw of The Batman, and some those documentaries look really good, too. If Tenet from last December can count, may I might add Mulan’s Official Trailer which also came out around that time. Even though the movie was a letdown, I thought they sold it well, with cinematography looking like this amazing wuxia epic, and using “Reflection” as the big operatic score. So much potential…