The Golden Trailer Awards, which acknowledge the individuals behind Hollywood’s best-made film previews, returns for its twenty sixth version Thursday.
The gala began in 1999 when co-founders Monica Brady and Evelyn Watters have been on the lookout for a staff to supply a trailer, solely to seek out that those that labored within the subject have been virtually nameless.
“Trailer editors, the people creating some of the most memorable moments of the moviegoing experience, were completely unrecognized,” Brady instructed AFP.
“They weren’t credited on trailers, they weren’t credited in films, and there wasn’t even a directory to find them.”
The pair, who stay as government producers on the award present, oversaw 19 prizes given out in the course of the inaugural ceremony in New York.
Today, the ceremony is held in Los Angeles and acknowledges achievements in over 100 classes.
But what makes one film trailer stand out from the remainder?
“What makes a great trailer, first and foremost, is a great hook,” Watters stated.
An honoree will possible have “a fresh storyline, compelling characters, an emotional moment, and something audiences haven’t seen before,” she defined.
“A winning trailer is a tempting appetizer, it is not the whole meal.”
Taylor Engel, a inventive director at Create Advertising Group — which acquired 16 nominations this yr for the corporate’s work on trailers for “Sinners,” “Tron: Ares” and “Only Murders in the Building” — stated enhancing a trailer is like placing collectively items of a puzzle.
“We get materials at the beginning of the project, and it could be anything. Sometimes you get the movie, sometimes you get just dailies, you know, just the scenes that they shot,” Engel stated.
The problem lies in combining the audio, video and enhancing results to “tell maybe a different story or showcase the movie in some way.”
Like movie enhancing, film trailers have advanced over the many years in Hollywood, and the crowded market for consideration has led to fierce competitors.
Sometimes, the trailer finally ends up being higher than the film itself — one thing that has change into its personal class within the Golden Trailer Awards.
Dubbed the “Golden Fleece,” this years nominees embody trailers for the horror movie “Shell” starring Elisabeth Moss and “The Strangers: Chapter 3.”
Despite the extraordinary competitors and demand, Engel stated that the work in making film trailers is just not below the identical stress to make the most of synthetic intelligence as different sectors of Hollywood.
“Every cut is very specific in why you pair a shot with a certain piece of music,” Engel stated.
AI instruments “may get better at recreating what’s been done in the past, but what’s exciting about trailers is when you see something that you’ve never seen before, you see it done in a different way,” the inventive director stated.
© 2026 AFP