Trailer Park

Posted in Film, Trailers
By Sam Bathe on 17 Apr 2008

Hit the cinema and you expect trailers. If the listed time is 8.30pm, there’ll be ten minutes of adverts following a similar amount of “other films you might enjoy”, with the main feature kicking in up to twenty minutes later. It’s part of the experience.

Relaxing at home you want something different. Pull a DVD from your collection for either a quick thrill or a lazy movie evening, and after powering up your player you’d hope to get straight into the action. For some reason a new phenomena is hitting home entertainment.

On an increasing number of DVD releases, distributers are now invading films with a pocket load of film trailers before the menu kicks in. In the cinema I’m all for getting a sneak peak of what’s to come, but on DVDs there’s just no need. At home, you can power-up Apple’s trailer website and catch the latest teasers and then even hit IMDB to boot. The pre-menu DVD trailers are often irrelevant to the film you’re about to watch, out of date unless you get to grips with the disc the minute you get home from the shops, and unforgivably, almost always unskippable.

If you’ve got five minutes to fill or just want to quickly refresh your memory of a particular scene, you’ll come unstuck. Click play to find to trailers popping up and even disc menu buttons or chapter advance options won’t work. I’m not sure if studios are trying to push this as the norm, but I for one couldn’t find it any more annoying.

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