Movie trailers are made by a film's marketing team working with specialist editing companies called trailer houses. The studio often hires several houses to cut competing versions, frequently before the film itself is finished, from raw footage, unfinished effects and licensed music. An editor builds about two minutes from the strongest lines and shots, title cards, music and dozens of layered sound effects, then revises it with the studio and test audiences, often past 30 versions, before it's approved for cinemas. A good trailer makes the premise clear in seconds, gives you the feeling of the film and someone to care about, and builds to a climax that leaves the story's biggest questions open.

Sources for the table: editors' accounts in The Ringer and ProVideo Coalition, and Stephen Follows' release-timing data.

Who makes movie trailers?

Movie trailers are commissioned by the studio's marketing department and usually cut by editors at independent trailer houses, which compete with each other for the job. For Marvel films, The Ringer reported in 2018, the studio would call three or four trailer houses, each house sent two or three first cuts, and the houses competed for "the finish", the right to complete the campaign. The same report put a house's starting fee at around $50,000, with the winning house's payout rising into the millions once teasers and TV spots were added.

A trailer house works like a small studio of its own. Mark Woollen's company, which cut trailers for The Social Network and Moonlight, employs producers, music supervisors, editors, copywriters and graphic designers, IndieWire reported in 2019. Studios also keep their own trailer staff: Woollen started out in Universal's trailer department, and Sony's Brian Brennan prepares footage for the studio's marketing teams and outside agencies.

The trailer business has been shrinking. The Hollywood Reporter reported in May 2026 that Trailer Park Group, one of Hollywood's best-known trailer companies, was closing its traditional US trailer division, cutting about 150 jobs.

Trailers are older than the modern trailer house. Film historians Keith M. Johnston and Jesse Balzer note ongoing debate about what counts as the first trailer, and describe how one company, the National Screen Service, controlled the making and distribution of American trailers from 1919 until the late 1950s.

How long does it take to make a movie trailer?

A finished theatrical trailer usually takes three to six months. Doug Brandt, head of the trailer house Ant Farm, told ProVideo Coalition that a trailer can go past 50 versions over three to six months on average, and that some have taken nine months. Brandt tries to give an editor two weeks for the first version. Pixar trailer editor Jeff Gritton told The Ringer that most trailers go past 30 versions and some reach 100, and that a first cut sometimes has to be turned round in two days.

The first trailer for a film usually appears about four months before release. Stephen Follows, who analyses film industry data, found that the first trailer came out an average of 126 days before release, with 4.5% arriving more than a year ahead. Big releases then add further trailers, TV spots and cutdowns of 60, 30 and 15 seconds, The Ringer reported.

Do editors cut trailers before the film is finished?

Trailer editors usually cut before the film is finished, because the campaign has to start while the film is still being made. Gritton told The Ringer that his team sometimes starts before filming has even begun, then works from the dailies, the raw footage shot each day. Brandt says visual effects shots are sometimes finished early for marketing, and that the film's music score is usually not written yet. For Gone Girl, trailer editor Mark Woollen told NPR, his team worked only with the first hour of the film for the whole campaign, so the ending stayed hidden even from the people selling it.

How does a trailer editor build a trailer?

A trailer editor first breaks the film down into its best lines and best images, then builds the sound, and cuts the picture to it last. Stephen Garrett, co-founder of the trailer house Kinetic, described in Filmmaker Magazine how he makes two sequences from the footage, a dialogue string and a visual string, and starts every trailer by building a music bed. Woollen told Wired that he watches the whole film without sound, looking only for images. Brandt describes the same order at Ant Farm: the audio and the dialogue structure come first, and picture fills in last.

Dialogue in a trailer is taken out of context and recombined. Garrett's phrase for it is that trailer editors "de-contextualize everything". Editor Ron Beck gave Mental Floss an example: the line "I need to find her" can be built from a character saying "find her" in one scene and "need to" in another. Title cards now carry most of the setup that a narrator once spoke. A Globe and Mail review of blockbuster trailers found that all ten top-grossing films of 1994 used a narrator in their trailers, against one of the top ten in 2013.

Sound design gives a trailer its weight. Adam Finkelstein of Trailer Park told Bostonia that about 40 sound effects are usually layered under what you see, and Heather Kreamer of the agency Create said a two-minute trailer may use 90 sound-design elements. The final mix alone takes hours and hours, according to Pixar trailer editor Jeff Gritton.

Audience testing then decides between versions. Bill Neil, an editor at the trailer house Buddha Jones, told The Ringer that companies test trailers with hundreds of people from different demographics, and that when viewers are asked what they want, "a lot of times the answer is 'more.'"

What is the structure of a movie trailer?

Most movie trailers follow three movements: set up a world and a character, complicate it, then intensify it in a fast montage that reaches a climax without resolving anything, followed by the title card. Stephen Garrett of the trailer house Kinetic lays this out in Filmmaker Magazine: act one introduces the characters and their environment, act two complicates their world with obstacles, and act three raises the tension. He adds that a trailer can have four acts or one, and that the most important rule is "never resolve anything!" It's a three-act story with the resolution left out.

The first seconds are a hook. Adam Finkelstein of Trailer Park says an editor has 5 to 10 seconds to get people very interested. Online, where viewers can skip ads, many trailers since the mid-2010s open with a few seconds of their biggest moments, which The Verge in 2016 called the teaser within the trailer.

Some trailers end with a button, a short joke or shock after the title. Boris Kachka described the standard shape in a 2014 profile of Woollen as a third-act montage followed by a jokey postscript called a button.

A teaser is the shorter, earlier version of this shape. It usually sets a mood or a single image and holds back the plot, while the full trailer, released closer to the film, lays out the premise and the conflict.

How is trailer music chosen or made?

Trailer music is usually licensed from libraries that write music specifically for trailers, because the film's own score is rarely finished when the first trailers come out. Dan Graham, who runs a trailer music library, told Sound On Sound that the score often hasn't been written when trailers air. Holly Williamson, head of music at the agency Ignition, said houses use library music because it's affordable and the rights are easy to clear. Music supervisors often send hundreds of songs before one is chosen, according to Heather Kreamer of the agency Create.

Trailer music is written in the shape of a trailer. Graham describes the usual pattern as a compelling intro, a building main section and a massive ending, with pauses that let the editor cut between tracks and an ending that reaches a huge climax without resolving. He also calls the pattern a cliché, and notes that many of the biggest trailers get custom music instead.

Familiar songs are often re-recorded for trailers. Brian Monaco of Sony Music Publishing described "trailerizing" a song to Variety as changing everything about it except the lyrics, usually into a slow, dark cover. The best-known example is Mark Woollen's trailer for The Social Network, built around a Belgian choir singing Radiohead's "Creep". The film's director, David Fincher, said the trailer made the film about what connectivity really meant.

The deep brass blast known as the "braam", popularised by the trailers for Inception in 2010, shows how one sound can spread across a whole genre. Who created it is still disputed between composers, and Trailer Park's head of music told The Hollywood Reporter that nobody wants to sound like they're copying Inception.

How long can a movie trailer be?

In American cinemas, a trailer is asked to run no longer than two minutes. That limit comes from the In-Theater Marketing Guidelines of the National Association of Theatre Owners, the cinema owners' trade group, renamed Cinema United in 2025. The guideline states that trailers "shall not exceed two minutes in length", allows each distributor two exemptions a year with a maximum of three minutes, and asks that cinemas show a trailer no sooner than 150 days before the film's release. It applies to films released from 1 October 2014. The owners called it voluntary, to be applied through each cinema chain's own policy.

Before 2014, the limit was two and a half minutes. The Motion Picture Association of America's advertising rules effective in 2009 said trailers must not exceed two minutes, thirty seconds, with one exception per studio per year, and The Hollywood Reporter described the new two-minute guideline as 30 seconds shorter than the old norm. The current MPA rules no longer set a length.

No rule limits trailer length online. In practice trailers have hovered around two minutes for most of film history: Stephen Follows' analysis of 6,926 trailers from top-grossing films released between 1930 and 2025 found an average of 122.8 seconds, with the longest trailers in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the shortest in the late 1980s.

What do green band and red band trailers mean?

A green band trailer has been approved to play without restrictions, and a red band trailer is restricted to adult audiences. In the United States, the Motion Picture Association reviews trailers for films it rates and approves them either without restrictions or with restrictions on placement. An approved theatrical trailer opens with a five-second green tag reading "The following preview has been approved to accompany this feature". A restricted trailer carries a red tag and, under the MPA's 2025 handbook, can only play before films rated R or NC-17; online it must sit behind an interface that restricts access by children. "Green band" and "red band" are industry nicknames taken from the colour of the tag, and the MPA's own ratings FAQ uses the term red band.

Why do trailers show scenes that aren't in the movie?

Trailers show scenes that aren't in the finished film because they're cut from footage before the film is locked, and shots are later trimmed, reshot or removed. Pixar trailer editor Jeff Gritton told The Ringer that the takes in a trailer are usually not the ones that end up in the film. Trailer editor Mark Woollen told Wired that early cutting is why you sometimes see things in trailers that don't end up in the movie. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is a well-known case: its director, Gareth Edwards, said marketing loved shots that later changed or dropped out of the film. A few teasers are shot separately altogether: Doug Brandt of the trailer house Ant Farm says the Cloverfield teaser was a special shoot.

Can a trailer be false advertising?

A trailer can count as advertising in court, but the one notable ruling is narrow. In 2022 two viewers sued Universal because Ana de Armas appeared in the trailer for Yesterday but had been cut from the film, and each had paid $3.99 to rent it. Judge Stephen V. Wilson ruled that the trailer constitutes commercial speech, so false-advertising claims could go forward, but he limited them to whether an actress or scene is in the movie, "and nothing else." The case never reached a verdict. The court later refused to certify a class and dismissed the case, and in April 2024 the parties settled with neither side getting anything, Variety reported.

Why do movie trailers give away so much of the plot?

Trailers give away plot because testing tends to show that audiences are more willing to buy a ticket when they know more of the story. Trailer editor Mark Woollen told NPR that the more audiences know, the more likely they are to go, and Bill Neil of Buddha Jones told The Ringer that when test audiences are asked what they want, the answer is often more. Viewers are split on the result: in a 2013 YouGov survey reported by The Hollywood Reporter, 49% of Americans said trailers give away too many of a movie's best scenes, yet trailers were also the most common reason people gave for choosing a film, at 48%.

Directors sometimes object. Alan Taylor, who directed Terminator Genisys, said he shot the film's central twist intending that no one would know, and the trailers revealed it anyway.

Research suggests that a clear story matters more than volume. A study of 140 trailers by Salma Karray and Lidia Debernitz, published in the International Journal of Advertising in 2017, found that the appeal of the storyline had the strongest positive effect on a film's expected success, and that packing in more scenes had a negative effect. The study measured expectations through the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a virtual market where players trade film "stocks", so it tells you about anticipation, not ticket sales.

What makes a good movie trailer?

A good movie trailer makes the premise clear, gives you the film's feeling and someone to care about, and holds back enough that you still need to see the film. Five questions, drawn from what trailer editors and filmmakers say about their best work, make a practical test for any trailer:

1. Can you say the premise in one sentence afterwards? Stephen Garrett, co-founder of the trailer house Kinetic, says a trailer "pitches the promise of the premise".
2. Do you know how the film will feel? Barry Jenkins said of the Moonlight trailer that you may not know what the film is about, but you know exactly what it feels like. Alejandro G. Iñárritu praised Woollen for expressing a film's emotional essence "in a clear but mysterious way".
3. Is there someone to care about? A trailer's first act exists to introduce its characters, and spectacle alone does little: a 2017 study of 140 trailers in the International Journal of Advertising found that special effects had no significant effect on expectations for the film.
4. Does it hold back the best surprises? Evelyn Brady, co-founder of the Golden Trailer Awards, told Marketing Brew that if you could give everything away in two and a half minutes, there probably wasn't much there.
5. Does it build once, and end on a question? Garrett's rule is never to resolve anything, and trailer music is written to climax without resolving.

The most admired trailers show how far restraint can go. The 1979 trailer for Alien has not a line of dialogue and only a flash of the creature, critic A.A. Dowd notes. Alfred Hitchcock's trailer for Psycho contains no footage from the film at all: Hitchcock gives a guided tour of the Bates Motel, hinting at what happened there while showing almost nothing. Both sell a feeling and a question, and neither gives away the story.

How do you make your own movie trailer?

To make your own trailer, pick one idea, choose the music first, and cut about a minute of footage to it in three movements that end on a title card. These steps adapt the professional process for a short film, a class project, a book or a video about someone you know:

1. Write the premise in one sentence. Every shot should serve that one promise.
2. Choose the music before the pictures. Professionals build the music bed and the dialogue first. Pick a track that starts quietly, builds and hits a peak, and mark its beats.
3. Hook in the first five seconds. Open on your most striking image or line, since viewers decide quickly whether to keep watching.
4. Set up, turn, build. Introduce the person and their world, show the problem or the change, then speed up the cuts as the music climbs. Let some shots breathe and others land fast, so it doesn't feel like a slideshow.
5. Use title cards for anything the footage can't say. A few short cards, a handful of words each, keep the pace up.
6. End on the title, not the answer. Stop at the peak, cut to the title card, and add a short button if you have a good one.
7. Keep it to about a minute. A personal trailer rarely needs the two minutes a film trailer uses, and cutting down forces you to keep only the best moments.

If you're working from photos instead of video, give each still a slow, deliberate move toward the face or detail that matters, the technique known as the Ken Burns effect.

If the trailer is about someone you know, for a birthday or a career milestone, yume can make it for you. The Legend of You is a birthday movie trailer starring your loved one: you add two to four photos, their name, the age they're turning and four to eight things they love, and our movie director makes a widescreen trailer of about a minute, with a narrator and trailer music, in which they star in scenes of those things. It uses the same shape professional trailers use, building to one final title card, "The Legend of [their name], Season [their new age] begins", and it never says happy birthday. The scenes are made from their photos, so it isn't footage of their real life, and it's currently in English only. It arrives in about 15 minutes and includes one edit. Watch The Legend of Maarten, the example on the page, to see whether the style suits the person you have in mind. For a new job, a promotion or a retirement, Trailer of Your Life turns a real career, from a LinkedIn profile or a typed history plus one to four photos, into a trailer made the same way, in which every fact comes from that career.