You probably didn’t hear about the last action film you watched from its trailer. More likely, you caught a clip mid-scroll, saw it stitched into someone’s reaction video, or had it served up by an algorithm that had already clocked your taste for practical stunts over CGI spectacle.
The old model of a big trailer drop followed by a poster campaign has quietly come apart, and what’s replaced it tells you a fair bit about how you find things to watch now.
1. The trailer stopped being the main event
Studios still cut trailers, but they’re no longer the centrepiece of a campaign. They’re raw material, chopped into a dozen short clips built for different platforms and different attention spans.
A single fight sequence gets its own life as a fifteen-second vertical video long before the full trailer lands, and that clip often does more work than the trailer ever will.
2. Social platforms have become the real premiere
Short-form video hasn’t just supplemented cinema marketing, it’s driving ticket sales directly. A LiveRamp and TikTok meta-analysis of 34 UK film campaigns found that titles running TikTok activity saw an average box office lift of 23.5% compared with those that didn’t.
That’s not brand awareness in the abstract, that’s people booking tickets because of something they watched on their phone an hour earlier.
3. Search behaviour has quietly become part of the campaign
Long before opening weekend, people are searching “is [film] worth watching,” “watch order,” or “post-credits scene explained,” and studios now build content specifically to sit in those results.
It’s a discipline agencies outside film have been refining for years. Maratopia, a London search marketing agency, works on exactly this kind of problem for its clients: making sure a brand shows up not just in Google but in the AI-generated answers that increasingly sit above traditional search results, which is fast becoming as relevant to a studio’s release strategy as it is to any retailer’s.
4. Stars are doing less press and more presence
Junket interviews haven’t disappeared, but they’ve been pushed down the priority list behind red carpet TikToks, cast Q&As on Reddit, and unscripted appearances on podcasts with loyal, self-selecting audiences.
Warner Bros. reportedly spent around $150 million marketing Barbie, more than the film cost to make, and a large share of that went into partnerships and cultural moments rather than conventional advertising.
5. Word of mouth moves faster, and further
Opening weekend reactions used to trickle out over days. Now a single clip of an audience gasping at a twist can circulate globally within hours, shaping whether someone books a ticket for Friday or waits for streaming.
That compresses the entire marketing window into the first 48 hours, which is why so much of a campaign’s energy now goes into engineering a strong first reaction rather than a slow build.
Posters and trailers still have a place, but they’re bit players now. The job of getting a film in front of you has splintered across dozens of smaller moments, most of which you’d never clock as marketing at all.