Dominion’ Trailer Is Surprisingly Spoiler-Free

Just 14 hours after their frankly impressive CinemaCon presentation (fun fact: Michael Wincott has a full-blown supporting role in Jordan Peele’s Nope), Universal has dropped the latest trailer for Jurassic World: Dominion online for all of us to see. Like the first teaser a few months ago, this one is mostly coasting on the status quo established by Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (dinos now live among us in the wild) and on the nostalgia factor of having all three core Jurassic Park stars (Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum) reprising alongside Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. And truth be told, with tickets going on sale today (Fandango has released the IMAX poster and some cast interviews as shared below) in advance of its June 10 domestic debut, the film doesn’t need to offer up much else.

Yes, it’s again a little odd to see a general audience/non-obsessive moviegoer-specific franchise selling itself in a “Don’t spoil a damn thing!” fashion akin to Disney’s Star Wars sequels or the recent MCU movies. As someone who spent years championing the fine art of spoiler-free marketing, I do think we’ve reached a different extreme whereby even telling audiences basic plot and character information is considered a bridge too far. When you have the movie (Frozen) and/or IP (Star Wars) that will get them in the door anyway, that’s fine. After all, if you can get audiences into theaters without giving away the game, the word of mouth will be that much better since audiences will have a sense of ownership and self-discovery of the film’s respective plot turns.

What we’re now seeing is big-scale marketing campaigns for films that are so cryptic that they make the films look and feel more complicated than they actually are. The most obvious example is No Time to Die, which made a pretty straightforward action-adventure drama seem like a labyrinth puzzle and left audiences wondering what the movie was about beyond “Hey, another James Bond movie.” Ditto Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which opens in theaters next week with consumers lacking even basic “What did Doctor Strange do to get him in trouble with his time overlords, what is at stake and is there a villain?” information.

Having seen the first reel yesterday, I can attest that the film’s kick-off is a lot simpler than I might have guessed. I’m sure Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will do just fine, but I am amused to see the marketing working so hard to hide basic act-one plot information (very abstract details – person searches out Doctor Strange’s help in dealing with a fantastical problem) that almost every review will, by default, have to divulge. This isn’t necessarily a criticism, although I do wonder if a more conventional 007 marketing campaign (the promos for Skyfall weren’t exactly spoiler-free) might have moved the needle a little on its domestic debut weekend. General audiences don’t care about spoilers anywhere near as much as perpetually online fans do.

For every Spider-Man: No Way Home (which smartly used first-act villain reveals to hide mid-film heroic reveals), there’s Sing 2 which topped $400 million despite giving away every single major plot point and character arc. The Matrix Resurrection had a spectacular first teaser, but it and the later trailer went out of their way to confuse moviegoers, which only would have worked if The Matrix was an A+ brand. The marketing campaign for The Force Awakens was so cryptic (even while showing right away that Oscar Isaac would survive his first-act ariel crash) that it gave a false impression that John Boyega’s Finn would be the “chosen one” Jedi hero. As seen with the backlash (at least online) to Hancock and Brave’s unrevealed second-act turns, the new normal is treating normal storytelling as “plot twists.”

Anyway, I don’t see any fraud going on with the Jurassic campaign, just a second trailer that keeps everything very close to the vest. Commercial considerations notwithstanding (I’m still pegging Dominion as the summer’s biggest global grosser), just because Universal can sell Jurassic World 3 as a mystery box flick doesn’t mean they should. The only risk, and it’s a very minor one, is that expectations for mindblowing reveals will color the reception when it turns out to be a pretty normal Jurassic flick. Uh oh, it might only make 94% of the money instead of “all the money.”