The Golden Compass

(last updated 3 July 2007)

The term "movie trailer" refers to all the material that film distributors attach to the front of the movie reel: commercials, film previews, sometimes even PSAs. But over time, the term has become synonymous with previews of coming attractions.

Since these are essentially commercials for movies, for the studios the criterion for a great trailer is easy: it's whatever makes people want to see the movie enough to do so...particularly if they do so opening weekend. The "opening weekend gross" and the "opening weekend per-screen average gross" are used to determine both...