Movie Trailers' Time Challenged By Theater Owners; Trailer Length May Be Cut By 30 Seconds

For those ticket buyers who feel that the trailers are the best part of their filmgoing experience, here's some bad news. According to THR, the National Association of Theater Owners (a.k.a. NATO, but not that NATO) have come up with new guidelines that will limit the length of movie trailers to two minutes. The current industry norm is for trailers to clock in at two minutes and 30 seconds.

Here's the money quote about this change, from an unnamed studio executive: "My trailers are 2.5 minutes because that's what we need to send the right message. This could be a paradigm shift. Thirty seconds is a long time."

Indeed it is, but it's doubtful that any studio will have a difficult time getting "the right message" out if theatrical trailers are limited to just two minutes in length. After all, so much movie marketing is now done online, that it's easy to imagine a world of 150-second "internet-only trailers," with 120-second variations cut together for movie theaters. And while THR notes that traditional media like television ads and in-theater trailers are the bread-and-butter of film marketing, it's hard to discount the power of the Internet.

"We teased the teaser," Oren Aviv, Fox Chief Marketing Officer, said about an online teaser for "Prometheus" to the Los Angeles Times last year. "And it was viewed 29.7 million times."

For more on the possible change to in-theater movie trailers, head over to THR.

[via THR]