Trailer (promotion)
advertisement for a feature film
A trailer (also known as a preview, coming attraction, or attraction video) is a short advertisement, originally designed for a feature film, which highlights key scenes of upcoming features intended to be exhibited in the future at a movie theater or cinema. It is a product of creative and technical work.
Movie trailers have now become popular on DVDs and Blu-ray discs, as well as on the Internet, livestreaming and mobile devices. Of some 10 billion videos watched online annually, film trailers rank third, after news and user-created video.
The trailer format has been adopted as a promotional tool for television shows, video games, books, and theatrical events/concerts.
History
The first trailer shown in an American film theater was in November 1913, when Nils Granlund, the advertising manager for the Marcus Loew theater chain, produced a short promotional film for the musical The Pleasure Seekers, opening at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. As reported in a wire service story carried by the Lincoln, Nebraska Daily Star, the practice which Loew adopted was described as "an entirely new and unique stunt", and that "moving pictures of the rehearsals and other incidents connected with the production will be sent out in advance of the show, to be presented to the Loew's picture houses and will take the place of much of the bill board advertising". Granlund was also first to introduce trailer material for an upcoming motion picture, using a slide technique to promote an upcoming film featuring Charlie Chaplin at Loew's Seventh Avenue Theatre in Harlem in 1914.
Due to trailers initially being shown after, or "trailing", the feature film, the term "trailer" was used to describe the promotion; despite it coming before, or "previewing", the film it was promoting. This practice was found to be somewhat ineffective, often ignored by audiences who left immediately after the film.
The public source identifies “Trailer (promotion)” as advertisement for a feature film. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Trailer, promotion and advertisement.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q622550. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1913 and 1914.
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This entry incorporates text from “Trailer (promotion)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.