Burned Out on the Trailer

Wildwood is my jam. I can tell that without having actually seen it yet. I don’t think Laika has a perfect record, but they have a pretty good one. I’m a sucker for basically American isekai, movies such as Labyrinth where Our Plucky Heroine has to learn the rules of a strange fantasy land to fulfill some quest. One of the earliest shows I remember loving was Wildfire, a cartoon where a girl rode a horse through a hole in the sky to a magic land where she was a princess. And have American isekai but Laika and set in Portland? Heck yeah I’m in. Therefore I didn’t need to see hundreds of trailers for it.

A mood that I think I share with a lot of people is “boy I can’t wait for this to come out and bomb so I stop seeing trailers for it.” Those movies that you look at and know are going to suck out loud. Movies you wouldn’t see at two in the morning with a crowd of rowdy friends to make fun of, because they won’t even be the right kind of bad. You know those movies. What’s at least as frustrating, though, is the kind of movie that pulls you in with the first trailer and by the time you’ve seen it forty or fifty times you would pay just to make it go away.

I’m not going to get into the debate about whether or not the Wildwood trailers were good or bad. In my opinion most trailers are bad. That’s fine; I’m used to it. What I will say is that the Wildwood trailers were ubiquitous for me for at least a month. Most of the commercials I see are on YouTube these days, and Wildwood trailers might have been as common to me as the Licorice Pizza trailers of yore were for me. To the point that I noticed when the trailers changed, which they did, several times. I can still quote some of the lines from them.

Okay, so I still haven’t actually seen the movie. There are reasons for that, not least that getting to the theatre is more of a production for me than it was, you know, before I had children. And maybe my children would enjoy the movie but going to the theatre with them is a mess even without getting into how much tickets cost these days. On the other hand, arguably this makes me an even worse target for the ads than the average person, because I know what I’m interested in and merely have a hard time actually getting to it. I’m seldom swayed by ads for movies, probably because I’m terminally online in the wrong ways to be swayed.

It could be worse. The Wildwood trailers have now been replaced by ads trying to convince me that data centers are good actually. (This is probably a good time to remind you all that we here at Media Magpies have a strong policy against the use of LLMs in any of our submissions.) At least few trailers, be it for movies I want to see or movies I don’t, make me angry on that level. All in all, though, I think I’d rather go back to seeing ads for prescription drugs. Not the goddamn LiMu Emu, though. I’m not that hard up.