This week’s Trailaurality blog explores the official teaser trailer for Dune: Part Three. Hans Zimmer’s scores for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films have made exciting and creative uses of layered vocals (check out his theme for the Bene Gesserit), so it rings true that the music in this trailer features humming, chanting, and shouting. The trailer’s cut in three parts, each part more intense than the previous. 

The official trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping dropped on April 13th, and it’s a clear shift. The franchise that blended James Newton Howard’s careful orchestration with curated alt and folk soundtracks has just released a remixed The Who track from 1973 over its first full-length trailer, announcing this isn’t your parents’ Hunger Games. Or, maybe rather it’s your grandparents’ Hunger Games—being as it is a prequel set twenty four years before the original, and the aesthetic definitely leans 70s here.

Aleasha Harris has adapted her award-winning 2018 play Is God Is into a thriller film and it looks and sounds intense. Gritty, distorted bass guitar comes in with a low register riff at 0:03 and even though we see on screen a black and white shot of two young girls (Racine and Anaia) hugging on a park bench, the music foreshadows conflict.

Following its 2021 reboot (and before that, the 1995 and 1997 originals), one of the most enduring video game movie franchises returns for round two courtesy of Warner Bros.

Mandatory military service now complete, BTS are back. Their new album Arirang was released on March 20th, their first album since 2022. Netflix, longtime proponents of the Korean Wave (Squid Game, K-Pop Demon Hunters, etc.), are releasing a documentary about this historic comeback.

First announced in 2023, Guy Ritchie’s latest has finally found its way to a release window, with a trailer leaning hard into his signatures: silence with style, dialogue with panache, and a hard-hitting music drop.

This week we’ll listen to the trailer for The Testaments, a new Hulu tv series based on a dystopian Margaret Atwood novel set years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. For the opening 19 seconds of the trailer we have voiceover from Agnes (played by rising star Chase Infiniti, who co-starred in One Battle After Another), as we see her present her dollhouse, with scene inserts of real people acting out the roles of the dolls she is describing. Meanwhile, the music sticks to gentle cinematic minimalism, slowly pivoting between two neighbouring notes using a voice-like synthesizer. It feels vaguely creepy, but we’re nowhere near horror film scoring. Yet.

Pixar's longest-running franchise is back for round five. The official trailer for Toy Story 5 dropped on February 19th, and while the teaser back in November leaned into INXS' "Never Tear Us Apart" as a statement of loyalty between toys and their kids, this full trailer takes a decidedly different tonal approach, trading a trailer deep in its feels for one that pivots towards a near-manic declaration of war against screens.

The official trailer for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film The Bride, set in 1930s Chicago, opens with the death of the title character (played by Jessie Buckley). At 0:06 we see the title character fall to her death in slow motion. Heartbeats begins to be heard, faint and slow at first. A frantic voiceover from the bride exclaims that she did not want any of this, and at 0:14 the heartbeat is now twice as frequent. At 0:18 we add the sound of a ticking clock (a motif commonly found in suspenseful trailers dating back at least as far as the 2017 Dunkirk trailer).

The first trailer for Spider-Noir dropped last week in two versions—"Authentic Black & White" and "True-Hue Full Color". The visual gimmick is eye-catching, but it's the sound that lands the sale of this mid-century reimagining of the wall-crawler.

GOAT, an NBA-inspired animated film, slams into theatres this Friday. It features a goat who becomes an underdog champion of roarball (like basketball, but played by animals, and more dangerous). To open the trailer we have a 6-second microteaser featuring basketball icon Stephen Curry (he’s a co-producer and voice actor in this film).

First shown at New York Comic Con, the teaser trailer for Daredevil: Born Again’s second season has surfaced online, and the choice of music sets the tone for where Matt Murdock's at for round two.

Euphoria, a tv series exploring coming-of-age storytelling through the filters of sex and substance abuse, is coming back for a third season on HBO Max. This series is adapted from a 2012 Israeli tv series of the same name. It’s fitting then that this American remake opens with a gospel choir singing the African American spiritual “Go Down Moses.”

It’s the top of the year, and that means it’s awards season—and we don’t just mean the Golden Globes! Each year, we hand out the most prestigious (in our opinion) and peculiarly specific awards to some of the most notable trailers in the previous year, with a particular ear, of course, to their use of music and sound.

On tap this week is A24's hugely anticipated Mother Mary, a psychosexual pop thriller that reunites director David Lowery with the indie studio for a third round, following A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. Lowery himself called it a "weird, weird film" at the Melbourne International Film Festival—so expectations are appropriately, uh, weird? In that lovely A24 way we've come to expect.

Marvel is going in all kinds of bold creative directions with their recent trailers. In recent weeks they began releasing standalone trailers for the character arcs of individual cast members of Avengers: Doomsday due out in December (with trailers for Steve Rogers and Thor released so far, might there be a full 25 more of these to come?). This approach sure throws the Teaser Trailer / Official Trailer / Official Trailer 2 model out the window.ııı

Christopher Nolan’s storied directing career so far has been as varied as it has been consistent, largely oscillating between vast historical events and intellectual sci-fi every few years. Cue The Odyssey, due for release three years after the cultural moment that was Oppenheimer, which sticks to the historical side of his work. Notably, Ludwig Göransson returns to score this one, marking a creative partnership that promises to endure; Göransson’s penchant and curiosity for the unconventional while staying firmly grounded in character-driven scoring served Nolan’s creative vision well in Tenet and Oppenheimer, and it looks like this partnership has only deepened.

I’ll be honest - sometimes we choose a trailer to blog about just for its use of a hit song that the Trailaurality bloggers–Curtis Perry and I–love from our childhoods. And that’s the primary justification this week for revisiting Project Hail Mary (yes, we did already blog about its first Official Trailer, back in July). But you have to do that sometimes (this year we also blogged about Wicked For Good trailers 1 and 2, because…obviously).

Minority Report meets The Fugitive? The first twenty seconds of this near-future drama (cue the quadcopter twelve seconds in) finds a justice system that is largely automated. The conceit here is that a detective, accused of his wife’s murder, has ninety minutes and counting to prove his innocence—lest he’s assumed guilty. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov (Ben-Hur, 2016) and starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, the opening expository dialogue is set to a custom arrangement of French electronic music producer Gesaffelstein’s 2013 release, “Hate or Glory”, put together by music agency The Crystal Creative. 

Sea of Monsters–the second novel in Rick Riordan’s wildly successful series–hits Disney+ this week. The official trailer for Season 2 of Percy Jackson and The Olympians opens with Percy (Walker Scobell) narrating the nightmare we’re seeing on screen. The accompanying music is a minimalist piano melody in A minor, with a repeated high register piano note as we’ve heard before. Percy wakes up from his dream, and at 0:21 as he says “I’m Percy Jackson,” we see an animated underwater Disney+ logo light up the screen.