Henry Cavill as James Bond? The fake trailer creators trolling Hollywood
It's a longstanding feature of the movie-marketing business that some trailers bear little relation to the films which they trail. But in the last few months, a new version of this nuisance has emerged: trailers which bear no relation whatsoever to any films at all.
If you've browsed through YouTube recently, you may have seen some. On the video-sharing platform last week, you could watch teasers for Bond 26, Spider-Man 4, Avatar 3, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, Avengers: Doomsday, a third season of Squid Game, Dune: Messiah, a James Cameron adaptation of The Last Train from Hiroshima, and a legacy sequel to The Mummy reuniting Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.
At the time of writing, all of these clips – posted by the innocuous-sounding Screen Culture channel – had accrued more than one million views between them. But there's a problem: none of the films they've supposedly been clipped from are real. Some are either in production or in the early stages of planning, though neither The Mummy reunion nor the Cameron Hiroshima project exist in any capacity. Yet in each case, there is around a minute and a half of footage for hungry fans to watch.
So who, or what, is behind it? The answer – which in most cases, is clear within seconds – is generative AI, glued together and given the barest wisp of credibility with snippets from other films. The dialogue is cliched, vague and lifelessly delivered by soundalike speech programmes; the visuals garish and cheap, with the actors' faces typically either frozen in place or unsettlingly flumping around. (Poor Fraser, seen jogging through catacombs in The Mummy 4 teaser, moves like a water balloon.)
But however obvious their phoniness may be, once you've clicked – and Screen Culture has nabbed its advertising revenue; its 1.38 million-subscriber reach can hit £15,000 per month – frustrated tuts don't count for much.
And click we do, in our tens of thousands. For a brief spell after Marvel Studios posted the first trailer for their forthcoming Fantastic Four film, bogus versions of the trailer were racking up more views than the official one. Even a month on, if you search YouTube for 'Fantastic Four trailer', four of the top six results are fakes. Three are hosted by Screen Culture, all with preview images that promise juicy new details (a battle with the Silver Surfer, a clear view of new villain Galactus) that aren't present in the licenced Marvel materials.
For Sam Cryer, founder and CEO of Intermission, the award-winning creative agency behind countless trailers ranging from Back to Black to The Crown, it's a perplexing development. And their fixation on story over emotion – 'telling viewers 'this is going to happen,' as opposed to 'this is how you're going to feel'' – is an especially depressing tell.
'Let's be honest: nobody is making fake trailers for [critically acclaimed Bafta Outstanding Debut nominee] Hoard,' he observes. 'Their audience is largely franchise fans who want to know what's coming up next, so dangling the prospect of a new piece of information is what brings those people in. And because there is already so much content out there, the AI has plenty of existing material to work with.'
Fake trailers may have become a scourge, but they sprung from one of YouTube's most creative subcultures – with help from a certain series of teenage vampire romance novels. YouTube's emergence in the second half of the Noughties aligned with the wild international success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books – and when the casting of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in the forthcoming film adaptation was announced in 2007, its ravenous fanbase weren't inclined to wait a year for their first glimpse at the unhappy couple.
A series of 'fan trailers' were cobbled together from the young stars' previous work. Yes, in much of it, Pattinson's Edward Cullen was wearing a Hogwarts uniform. But it still gave a tantalising suggestion of how the pair might look on screen together – if not in the same shot.
They were, by today's standards, endearingly amateurish. But they served their purpose, which was to meet their makers' and watchers' appetites for content that reality had thus far failed to provide. Other fandoms quickly followed suit. Mash together standalone footage of Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, and hey presto: The Avengers. Indeed, Hollywood's pivot to franchises gave the practice a new sense of purpose, as viewers could collectively imagine what might be coming in the instalments ahead.
One early success story was Smasher, a channel founded in 2013 and run by the freelance video editor and digital marketer Rob Long. His 'concept' trailers resemble more evolved versions of those early Twilight mash-ups – speculative daydreams created from footage culled from multiple films and bespoke sound design and visual effects. He describes the process as 'a huge undertaking… they can take anywhere from days to weeks to complete. The creative payoff is huge, though, especially when people respond positively.'
Take the 'saga trailer' he cut together before the 2019 release of Star Wars: Episode IX. Juxtaposing footage drawn from across the three trilogies with judicious match cuts, it moved some fans to tears – and yes, there's a reaction video of that very thing happening, posted by the channel DrowningInFandomFeels.
For Cryer, such tributes and what-ifs are worlds apart from AI-made horrors. Rather, they share more DNA with the mood-boarding exercises trailer houses like Intermission are often asked to assemble by studios before a big film goes into production, where clips are pulled from similar features and assembled into a trailer-like proof-of-concept reel which anticipates the new project's aesthetic and tone.
Indeed, many amateurs from the fan-trailer world have found success in the business. In 2005, a then-25-year-old video editor's assistant called Robert Ryang cut a trailer for The Shining that sold Kubrick's horror masterpiece as a mushy comedy. The result went viral.
'As a result, I was immediately promoted to editor at the post-production house where I worked, and it helped me book projects which I otherwise wouldn't have gotten with my level of experience,' he remembers via email. 'I still spent decades building a reel and getting more skilled with each project, but the Shining trailer definitely got the ball rolling much quicker.'
Long also includes his concept trailers in his portfolio, and feels conflicted about generative AI's arrival in the space. 'It has definitely shaken things up, making certain aspects like generating visuals more accessible,' he concedes. 'But at the same time, it raises ethical questions about authenticity and how audiences interpret what they see.'
It also allows unscrupulous creators to churn out twaddle at speed – and a fast content turnover is catnip for YouTube's algorithms. A concept trailer can take an individual video editor weeks to perfect, but viral outlets typically post up to four every day. Like Smasher, many of these channels have been around for years, but their embrace of AI has been like Hemingway's bankruptcy: gradual, then sudden. Over the past 18 months, elements like facial replacement and soundalike dialogue have crept in, but it was only towards the end of last year that the wholesale collapse into fractal gloop began.
Channels found furrows that worked and ploughed them relentlessly. One called Dacuin specialises in young female Disney characters in compromising situations: there are trailers for Moana 3 in which Moana has been knocked up by Maui, and ones for Inside Out 3 in which teenage Riley appears in skimpy outfits. Another, Multiverse of AI, used AI to create a fake trailer for a live-action Simpsons film, starring Adam Sandler as patriarch Homer.
Screen Culture, based in India, has a longstanding preoccupation with the sitcom Friends: an early move into 'parody trailers' in 2020, when the channel was still known as Screen Alcoholics, yielded such offbeat confections as 'Joker trailer but it's Chandler Bing from Friends', 'Joker trailer but it's Joey Tribbiani from Friends,' 'Birds of Prey trailer featuring Phoebe Buffay from Friends', and ' Morbius trailer but it's Ross Geller from Friends.' With AI now at its disposal, no depth is too ghoulish to plumb. Last summer, it offered viewers three trailers for a supposed Friends reunion film whose plot had been prompted by Matthew Perry's death, titled The One With Chandler's Funeral.
Then there's KH Studio, which loves remakes, especially ones starring Henry Cavill. According to their recent output, the former Superman actor is about to appear in Spartacus, Highlander, Bond 26, a Gladiator reboot and Conan the Barbarian, as well as Marvel's Captain Britain.
There's a world of difference, however, between seeing Cavill's face unconvincingly grafted onto Jason Momoa's body in the 2011 Conan film nobody saw, than watching, say, Smasher's concept trailer for a Warhammer 40,000 film – starring Cavill, obviously – which artfully magpies scenes from The Tomorrow War, Thor 4, Avatar 2 and the recent Space Marine video game.
'It's been a real struggle in our community over the past few years and a lot of us, friends included, have been cannibalised by these channels,' Long says. 'I've always been conscious about making it clear that my trailers are 'concepts', but the line between real and fan-made is blurring more than ever.'
For professionals like Cryer, AI is, in a sense, a force for good – in that it compels the industry to think more creatively, and try new things that couldn't simply be triangulated from existing data.
'We have quite a set idea of what a trailer is, but in fact they keep changing,' he says. 'When I got into the industry they relied heavily on narration – the 'in a world…' or 'meet Steve' sort of thing. Then we had lots of text cards, which you don't get now. Then there were all the plaintive solo female vocalist covers of popular songs. Now we have 'bumpers' – those three-second trailers-for-trailers that play at the start to catch people's attention because the audience is now online, and no longer captive. But then these ideas cross over into other media and you have to come up with something new. And AI forces us to keep thinking.'
Do the studios mind? 'They will have made peace with it to a degree,' he says. 'But problems arise when they swamp platforms to the extent that the real ones can't be found, or are done so badly that they negatively impact people's view of the original material.' As a way to gauge a product's overall desirability, though, it seems pretty sharp.
'Now there's a thought,' Cryer muses. 'A studio could test the market for a possible future blockbuster by putting out a fake trailer for it first.' In fact, in light of all of the above, the chances of this actually happening now feel inevitable. So I'm going to click 'like' on that Cavill Warhammer 40,000 clip, just in case.
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