The director of the film, Bryan Singer, chose to use an enigma code for the trailer to set a sense of mystery; he does this by not giving too much away in the trailer, but showing us that Todorov’s theory has been used to show us that the film starts of with everyone and everything equal and normal, and then something disturbs the equality, and at the end the equality is back we say they film has equilibrium.
The film was marketed using a “Teaser Campaign” this is when a number of trailers are released before the film; in the Xmen’s case there were three trailers, Trailer A, did not give a lot of information, but just indicated the genre of the film, Trailer B, was released about two months before the film, and included more information , dialog, and the production company, and finally Trailer C, was released only a short time before the film, giving the spectators one final taster of the film prior to its release. This film was clearly a Hollywood Blockbuster, made by a major film studio; it cost a great deal of money to construct, it needed a global audience, and it had a simple narrative of good verses evil, all these points told the audience that the film was High Concept.
The conventions that signify that Xmen is a science-fiction film were the colours that are used throughout the film, blues, blacks, silvers and whites gives the trailer a sense of modern technology. The media language of the trailer works well, with the fast pace and the swift camera work, there were no faders or dissolves between the clips, instead, all the clips are cut and each one lasted not longer than five second, this was a good way of keeping up the fast pace.
The Unique Selling Point for the film was its impressive special effects; lots of these were used in the trailer, to provide the audience with a sample of what they would see if they went to watch the actual film. The distribution company of the film did all they could to make money but unfortunately 20th Century Fox are not a Vertically Integrated Company, this means that they could not keep all the profit that the film made because they only produced the film and did not have their own cinemas to show it in, we say that they were Partially Vertically Integrated Company.
As we rocket all the way through the circular, metal doors at the start of the trailer it is as though we have entered the world of the Xmen. Then we hear one of the main characters say,” Hold on to something” this is used to make the audience grasp what is about to happen. Circles recur a lot in the trailer, I think this is to suggest that the life of the mutants is never ending like a circle, and the mutants are developing constantly.
Binary oppositions were used to show us that good will always triumph over evil, we know that good will always win but the viewers still want to witness the fight for equality, we can also call this narrative theory.
The Tag Line for the film is, “A Change Is Coming” these words come in time with the music, in the metallic colours I mentioned previously, other ways to markets a film would be posters, articles, recommendations and merchandising, but none of these seem to be as successful as trailers, this is because the trailers are usually shown at the screening of another film of the same genre and rating, so that the target audience would see it.
