Movies

2017: A Year In Movie Trailers

By  · Published on December 5th, 2017

Trailers are the best parts of some movies and this is the best of the best.

Most end-of-year videos highlight the absolute pinnacle of industry output to celebrate achievement. I’m enamored with good trailer compilations because they must inherently include snippets from very bad movies. That’s just statistics. When they do it well, it’s a moving reminder that even the worst movie contains a few seconds of magic.

Curating everything from Geostorm to The Dark Tower, Clark Zhu’s trailer mashup finds wonder in the overly-ambitious and underappreciated. That’s not to say Zhu ignores critical favorites or popular smashes, throwing in a few choice editing moments maximizing the impact of some of 2017’s biggest movie titans (think Wonder Woman).

Embracing the driving power of past trailers, with their impossible need to forever be building to a future payoff that’s already occurred, Zhu constructs meanings of his own that are powerful, fun, and downright invigorating – especially if you find yourself struggling to remember the great year of film we’ve had in 2017.

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Jacob Oller writes everywhere (Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Playboy, FSR, Paste, etc.) about everything that matters (film, TV, video games, memes, life).