NATO Wants Hollywood To Stop Giving Away the Ending in Trailers

Okay, I’m actually talking about the National Association of Theater Owners, but I couldn’t resist that title and neither could you if you were in my place, don’t even pretend.

It sounds like the NATO found out about that study released earlier this month that showed that nearly half of all Americans believe that movies show all of their best scenes in the trailers, and that nearly a third of them think they’ve already seen too much of the plot by the time they finish the average trailer. According to /Film, they’ve come up with some suggestions.

The first is to cut the length of trailers, from an industrywide soft guideline of 2:30 to just two minutes, which doesn’t seem like the most direct way to keep studios from giving everything away in their teasers, but I’m not really sure what a direct way would entail. But /Film continues:

NATO is also considering new guidelines that prevent movies from being marketed more than four months before their release dates (with some exceptions), and that require all promos to include a movie’s release date. Not surprisingly, studios have “reacted none too well” to these proposals. While all of these rules would technically be voluntary, studios worry that theaters could refuse to show certain marketing materials if they don’t fit the standards.

Hahaha, movies can only do publicity four months before release? That’d be like restricting the length of the American presidential campaign season. Except that my quality of life would be far more demonstrably improved the by later. But if NATO is reacting to the stats revealed by that study, then they might be relieved to know that only 19% of those surveyed have ever let a too-spoilery trailer stop them from going to see a movie. Then again, in the current theater market, 19% is nothing to sneeze at. Frankly, I’d love to see a world in which every teaser for a movie included its release date, since I routinely forget those.

Seriously, did you know Thor: The Dark World is coming out this fall, not next summer?

(via /Film.)