A teaser, also called a teaser trailer, is the first and shorter preview of a film. It usually runs about half as long as a full trailer, comes out early, sometimes before the film is finished, and sets up the mood, the tone or a single idea while holding back the plot. A trailer comes closer to release, runs about two minutes, and lays out the premise, the main characters and the conflict, broadly in the order the story unfolds. Trailer makers interviewed by The New York Times in 2013 drew the same line: trailers often focus on plot and character, while teasers establish mood and tone and "don't have to be chronological", as Stephen Garrett of the trailer house Jump Cut put it.
How long is a movie teaser compared with a trailer?
A teaser usually runs about a minute to a minute and a half, and a trailer about two minutes. A 2016 Yahoo history of micro-teasers put standard trailers at two to three minutes and teasers at about half that. That is a journalist's rule of thumb rather than a measurement, because no published dataset separates the two.
The best measurement covers all previews together. Stephen Follows' analysis of 6,926 trailers from top-grossing films released between 1930 and 2025 found an average of 122.8 seconds, with most years since 2010 just above two minutes. That sample includes teasers, so full trailers alone would average slightly more.
Cinema owners set a ceiling in 2014. The National Association of Theatre Owners, since renamed Cinema United, issued voluntary guidelines asking for trailers of no more than two minutes, 30 seconds shorter than the norm at the time, The Hollywood Reporter wrote. Each distributor could exempt two films a year, and even those trailers were to stay under three minutes, according to Deadline. Follows found the guidelines had only a slight dampening effect on length. Our guide to how movie trailers are made covers the other rules a trailer is cut to, including ratings.
At the short end are micro-teasers of 30 seconds or less, which studios often release to announce that a longer trailer is on the way. The shortest preview in Follows' dataset of just over 20,000 films released between 2000 and 2016 was an 11-second teaser for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
When are movie teasers released compared with trailers?
Teasers come first, often many months before a film opens, and trailers follow as the release date gets closer. Follows' study of 1,000 films released between 2000 and 2016 found that the first preview of any kind arrived an average of 126 days, about four months, before release. Four in five films had one out within six months, and only 4.5 percent released one more than a year ahead. Animated films started earliest, at 217 days on average.
Early teasers can appear before there is much film to show. Paramount's teaser for Cloverfield played in cinemas before Transformers in July 2007, weeks after shooting had begun, and gave a release date without revealing the title. The 1998 Godzilla teaser cost $600,000 and used no footage from the finished film, because it was completed before the main shoot. Follows calls that a rarity. Pixar, whose films take years to make, has produced a few seconds of original footage to promote each one, Yahoo reported.
Cinema screens have their own timing limit. The 2014 exhibitor guidelines also asked that no trailer play in cinemas more than 150 days, about five months, before a film's release.
What does a movie teaser show compared with a trailer?
A teaser shows just enough to make a film recognizable and wanted: an image, a mood, a star, a title or a date. It leaves the story for later. The New York Times gave the example of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, whose trailer Garrett described as closer to a typical teaser. For the trailer's first 40 seconds, Lincoln himself is seen only from behind or in profile.
A trailer explains what the film is about. In the same New York Times piece, trailer specialist Bill Woolery described the Silver Linings Playbook trailer as the standard model: it introduces the story and its characters and largely follows the order of the film. Garrett told NPR that a trailer has to balance drawing people in against spoiling the plot, and that one that works is "hitting story beats, one after the next", giving a clear idea of what the film is like and what to expect. A teaser avoids that balancing act by holding the story back.
Is a short trailer the same as a teaser?
A short trailer is not automatically a teaser. The label describes the preview's job and its place in the campaign more than its running time. Lincoln's full trailer worked like a teaser, and a one-minute preview that walks through the plot is a short trailer. The industry treats the forms separately: the Golden Trailer Awards give Best Teaser its own feature-film category alongside the genre trailer categories and judge television spots separately again.
The two forms can also be combined in a single piece. yume's The Legend of You is a birthday video made like the trailer for a big show, with a narrator and trailer music. It runs about a minute, which is teaser length, yet it is built as a trailer about one real person, and it ends like a teaser, on a title card announcing what comes next: "The Legend of [name], Season [new age] begins".