The 10 Best Movie Trailers of the Last 10 Years

Trailers aren’t built to last. They’re advertisements; they’re placeholders. Once the film they’re designed to promote premieres, a trailer serve no further purpose. Why watch the trailer when you can watch the real thing? At that point, a trailer becomes a cinematic appendix; present but without a clearly designed purpose.

Still, we live in a world where pretty much every trailer lives forever online, available whenever and wherever on YouTube. If one were so inclined, a person could rewatch a slew of them all at once and then rank the ten best of the last decade.

Reader, I am so inclined. And so here are, in one man’s humble opinion, the best trailers of the last decade. Keep scrolling to watch them all.

10. Logan

We have gotten way too many trailer this decade with incongruously depressing music played over blockbuster spectacles. The cliché still works sometimes, though, as in the moody ad for Logan. Look, if anyone knows what it’s like to hurt, it’s the guy who can heal any injury — and has spent the last century getting beaten and shot and slashed to death. So the depressing music isn’t quite as incongruous in this case.

9. Longlegs

Horror trailers are all about precise editing; when to hold on a shot to build suspense, and when to cut away from some terrifying image before you running afoul of the MPA. You won’t find a better example of that than the trailer for Longlegs, Osgood Perkins’ thriller about a monstrous serial killer — glimpsed here only in the most fleeting of glances. A lot of the images don’t make sense out of context — who or what is covered in that black shroud??? — but that only makes them more troubling and nightmarish. Bad dreams don’t make sense out of context either.

8. Suicide Squad

Okay, so the movie itself was kind of bad. (Okay, so it was terrible.) But if you believe the stories that circulated back in 2016, the movie was in some ways a victim of the excellence of its trailers, which sold a fun, hyperkinetic adventure jam-packed with classic rock tunes. According to The Hollywood Reporter, when director David Ayer didn’t deliver a film that matched the trailers, the studio actually brought in the company that made the trailer to help them create a cut of the movie that matched their commercial. That arguably wound up working against the movie. But you gotta admit: The trailer itself was darn good.

7. Jackie

The use of the title song from Lerner and Loewe’s musical Camelot may seem like a strange fit for a biopic about the life of Jackie Kennedy. But given the period, and the end of optimism that JFK’s assassination came to represent, it makes perfect sense. It’s a bold choice for a movie full of them.

6. Mission: Impossible — Fallout

Tom Cruise is a trailer editor’s dream. He does all his own stunts, and he does a loooooot of them in every single movie. Fill up 150 seconds with Cruise being Cruise, throw in a slick song, and you’ve got a winner.

5. A Star Is Born

I’m not sure I can adequately explain why this is one of the best trailers of the last ten years. I just know I’ve watched it 300 times. When I hear “Maybe It’s Time” I think of it. Then I watch it again. And right before I start the clip, I always say “Hey. I just want to take another look at you.”

4. Nope

Watch the use of off-screen space in this one. All the characters keep craning their necks up, looking to the sky. Even the “FROM JORDAN PEELE” title card descends from above the frame and slowly drifts down into view, like an unidentified flying object settling over the Southern California desert. The Nope trailer does a remarkably job of establishing this horror film’s terrifying stakes. And in the entire clip, do they show the mysterious creature at the center of the story? Or even tell you what the movie is really about? Nope.

3. Hail, Caesar!

After this trailer, if the entirety of Hail, Caesar! had been Ralph Fiennes trying to direct Alden Ehrenreich as a socialite, I would have been 100 percent okay with that. Would that it t’were so simple.

2. The Brutalist

The first teaser for The Brutalist copies the movie’s distinctive sideways opening credits crawl and pairs it with director Brady Corbet’s striking images and composer’s Daniel Blumberg’s booming, Oscar-winning score. All of that combines to create the impression of a sweeping epic drama. The use of a singular pull quote — “MONUMENTAL” — credited to five different outlets is another clever choice, both because it suggests a massive critical consensus, and also for the wordplay of comparing a film about a brilliant architect to a monument.

1. La La Land

An iris in, a lonely whistle, a plaintive piano line. The trailer for La La Land immediately establishes a mood that is at once deeply romantic and painfully sad. In just a few seconds, you know this film will melt your heart and then stomp the remains into oblivion, and make you enjoy every single second. That’s good movie marketing.