Trailers for trailers? Movie studios in the TikTok era are competing for 1 second of your precious attention

This week, trailers for ‘Dune: Part Three’ and ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ came with their own pre-trailer hype. Blink and you might have missed it.

Trailers of two of Hollywood’s most anticipated upcoming movies came out this week. Warner Bros. Discovery’s Dune: Part Three and Marvel Studios’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day premiered a day apart. 

But what’s most interesting is the marketing strategy behind the trailers—in which promos and short clips of the trailers were released ahead of the full trailers. 

On Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery hosted a livestreamed event on the official Dune account on TikTok.

It featured director Dennis Villeneuve and some of the cast talking about the upcoming movie to a live audience before airing the trailer, which was simultaneously revealed at the end of the stream before being rolled out on other platforms like Instagram and YouTube. 

Videos with the star-studded cast—including Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Javier Bardem—urging fans to watch the trailer circulated online, and were later shared from the Warner Bros. Discovery and IMAX social accounts.  

Meanwhile, Marvel Studios released the official trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day on Wednesday.

But the day before, Tom Holland announced on Instagram that he and the studio were “doing something that has never been done before” and that “some of our greatest fans are going to help us release pieces of” the trailer.

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