Film Posters and Trailers. Are your expectations met?

Movies play such a huge part of our lives and we are exposed to them either through streaming platforms or at the movie theatres, particularly pre-Covid19. At the same time, they are integral part of the creative industries, with Hollywood dominating the field. With so many film choices circulating, what persuades us to watch movies and how come sometimes our expectations are satisfied with what we see while others not? Key part of our cinematic experience, are the marketing material which we are exposed to prior to watching a film, especially film trailers but more traditional media as well like posters. Not only do they influence the ways in which we perceive the main movie, but they play a vital role in persuading us to go and watch a particular film. Therefore, the particular research is concerned with answering the following: How do films create expectations through promotional material?. And are those expectations met?. In order to do that, the study employed the promotional material, particularly posters and trailers, of the top box office movies in Greece the year 2020. These were 1917 (Mendes, 2020), Tenet (Nolan, 2020), Little Women (Gerwig, 2020), The Gentlemen (Richie, 2020) and The Invisible Man (Whannell, 2020). The study proceeded by applying semiotic analysis to the marketing material for these movies in order to expose the persuading strategies they utilized, the derived expectations from each medium but also the synergy and cohesion between. From the analysis it was evident that they highly promote their selling points whether genre, stardom or story through which they appeal to the familiarity and sensations viewers are likely to have with them, but an inconsistency was traced between the two materials. In the second part of the research, 10 semi-structured interviews were conducted via Zoom with Greek audiences that were divided in two age groups, one being 18-30 and the other 30-50s. The interviews were transcribed and thematic analysis was used to trace the emerging patterns though which four main themes were found: 1) Promotional Material and Persuading Effectiveness, 2) Expectations through Paratextual Mediums, 3) Cohesive Expectations and 4) Opposing Expectations. From the study it was concluded that trailers were the most persuasive medium and that movie appeals as well as formulation of expectations are highly related to personal experiences. From the examined movies, only one unanimously met the expectations, 1917 (Mendes, 2020) while the others sparked conflicting views.