‘Announcement’ trailers and the inter-temporality of Hollywood blockbusters

Abstract

This article examines the blockbuster ‘announcement’ trailer. As teasers-for-the-teaser-trailer, these ephemeral texts invite audiences to look forward to an upcoming film while also calling on them to look back to a previous cinematic encounter. Moreover, their specific reveal-conceal structure also encourages fans to scan the text for clues (to look inward) while making connections to previous texts (to look outward). Building on Jonathan Gray’s concept of ‘speculative consumption’, wherein audiences ‘create an idea of what pleasures any one text will provide’, this article refers to this textual construction and affective sensation as speculative nostalgia, asserting that it is constitutive of today’s blockbuster culture. When situated into the contexts of their industrial and spectatorial temporality, announcement trailers prove to be rich sites for examining blockbusters, not only as intertextual commodities which spread far and wide, but also as inter-temporal commodities in which specific temporal structures are shaped, shared, revised, and felt.