Trailers, Taking The Lead

My 10 favorite movie trailers of all time

Jul 16, 2025

15 years ago, I sat in a theater to watch Inception on opening day … great movie. But, frankly, what struck me even more than Nolan’s brainy blockbuster was 150 seconds from the preceding trailer block.

A moody, choral cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” gently begins to play as an image comes into focus. It’s a Facebook post. This technology, just six years old and yet already remaking much of the world as we knew it, began to assume a new gravitas by expressing a deep yearning lurking underneath mundane digital interactions. Then, another image emerges from the ocean of pixels to make clear what the spot was for: Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.

The trailer single-handedly flipped my anticipation of The Social Network on a dime, turning it from a dreaded project to my most eagerly anticipated for the remainder of 2010. I think it’s the defining film of the century thus far, and this little bit of marketing went a long way in laying the groundwork for that to become a fairly consensus opinion. This trail-blazing trailer accomplishes what the best advertising can do: show you something familiar but make it feel different and exciting in a way that makes you lean in to engage further.

In my inaugural piece for the “Smells Like ‘10s Spirit” column I wrote for Decider a few years back, I wrote an extended essay about how The Social Network’s trailer changed the way we watched movies. Five years on from publication, we’re still living in the shadow of these 150 seconds. Movie after movie lines up to sell itself to audiences with an odd cover of a well-known tune, as if to declare, “You know the text, but let us wow you with a different style.”

So it only felt right to take today as an occasion to celebrate ten of the best trailers of my lifetime. These are core units of film consumption; look at just about any newsletter I’ve ever sent, and you’ll probably find about a dozen links to watch them. (I keep an entire running YouTube playlist of my favorite trailers, in case you’re curious what just missed the cut.) Today, I celebrate the snackable snippets that help sell my favorite art form — watch along and let me know what other trailers stick in your mind years later!

#2 - Madeline’s Madeline

Sometimes, a trailer can be a magnificent work of art independently of the movie itself. That’s the case of Josephine Decker’s handmade, hardscrabble trailer for Madeline’s Madeline. It captures the experimental nature of the theater group that the titular character joins, not just by showing the avant-garde art but by embodying it.

#3 - The Devil Wears Prada (teaser)

The biggest gripe with trailers these days is that they show away too much to get butts in seats. Some studio execs might argue this is a necessary and justifiable tactic, but I think there’s a way to let audiences know exactly what they’re getting without showing the whole movie or spoiling major plot points. Case in point: the ingenious first teaser for The Devil Wears Prada that essentially just uses a scene from early in the film to introduce us to the characters and the tension. A great early scene should just be doing this anyway!

#4 — Les Misérables (teaser)

I can’t help but upweight the first bit of Les Misérables footage released to the public because it does tie back to another thing I wrote. The framing device for my senior thesis on the use of the close-up in movie musicals stems from an apocryphal tale that Eddie Redmayne suggested, based on the strength of Anne Hathaway’s close-up in this teaser, that they try playing the whole number at that camera distance.

#5 — Carol (UK teaser)

I’ve only watched Todd Haynes’ Carol three times start to finish, but I feel as if I’ve seen it hundreds of times given how much I’ve watched this trailer. This brief one-minute glimpse at the film is like microdosing Haynes and DP Ed Lachman’s lookbook for their mid-century romantic drama. There’s a tension in the sapphic yearning that doesn’t declare itself but feels palpable in every interpreted gaze and each graze of fingers. Maybe the “Harold, they’re lesbians” lady might have gotten the memo if The Weinstein Company (derogatory) used this edit rather than their bland cuts.

#6 — Jackie (teaser)

I held off on watching the teaser for Jackie until after I’d seen the film on the 2016 festival circuit, and I was so struck by how well it captures the rollercoaster ride of watching the work itself. The trailer clearly announces Pablo Larraín’s vision of presenting the presidential iconography, but then quickly cuts to the bone underneath the stodgy biopic conventions. The shifts in the imagery pair sublimely with the drift of the music away from the triumphant “Camelot” theme into Mica Levi’s ominous strings … before returning with the Broadway chorus and the heralding trumpets. I still get chills every time I watch this, which is often.

#7 — Kinds of Kindness (teaser)

It’s not often that a teaser trailer can set off an entire YouTube editing trend, especially when it’s for a movie that grossed $5 million domestically. (Watch any of them for a movie you love and have a blast.) But man, Yorgos Lanthimos sure knows how to market his movies, even if not nearly enough people show up to see them. The Kinds of Kindness trailer might be his apotheosis. Quick, jarring cuts between scenes that seem to have no logical connection are the bread and butter of trailers these days, but that’s often at the core of his image-making anyway as an absurdist. There’s such a sense of playful fun, too, that always comes across.

#8 — The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (teaser)

Another Fincher! I will never forget seeing this trailer before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and knowing nothing about the film besides its status as an early Oscars frontrunner. Naturally, I approached a work that carried such a distinction with a heavy amount of skepticism. But as I essentially watched the story’s chronology (and Benjamin’s reverse life trajectory) play out over two minutes, my head and my heart were completely in. I had to know what could string all these disparate shots together. It breaks all the rules I have about potentially showing too much, but the whole thing manages to work without making you feel like you’ve already seen the movie by the time the title card drops.

#9 — Man of Steel (teaser)

OK, maybe this isn’t a personal favorite, but there had to be at least one trailer on here for a straight-up BAD movie! Nowhere is the power of advertising to disguise a dude more prevalent than in a trailer that blatantly misrepresents the product and tricks an audience into thinking they’re getting something. Kudos to whoever at Warner Bros. thought they could get stolen valor from blatantly ripping off a Terrence Malick/Tree of Life aesthetic to make us think we were getting an impressionistic superhero movie instead of a CGI mess. In the words of Ja Rule, “I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hood winked, lead astray!!!”

#10 — The Zone of Interest (teaser)

I have to put on my advertiser’s hat for this one: I cannot even imagine how challenging the brief was to create a trailer to sell The Zone of Interest. The entire movie’s success depends on a stylistic choice that is virtually impossible to convey the complexity of without context. The approach is something just as chilling without giving away the game in the slightest. It approximates the experience of watching Jonathan Glazer’s singular examination of moral compartmentalization even as it does not exactly resemble the aesthetics.

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