I'm at the point of my hype where I'm just consuming constant Spider-Man content. Watching Spectacular Spider-Man again, gonna play some of the games, today I watched through all the trailers for the live action movies...and I noticed something.
The trailers for what many consider to have the most story problems, ASM2 and Spider-Man 3, try so hard to avoid telling the audience anything about even the basic premise of the film's story. In the case of ASM2, there are entire lines of dialog in the trailers that tease vague ideas of plot threads that when you actually go and watch the thing, didn't even make it into the final cut. Remember when Harry told Peter that Oscorp had him under surveillance? Not in the movie. Norman saying "we have plans for you Peter Parker"? Gone.
Compare this to, say the trailer for Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2. You know that Harry wants revenge on Spider-Man, Peter is struggling to have a life of his own, even throwing away his costume at one point, things aren't going well for him and MJ who says she's getting married, and we have a clear idea of the villain. Sure we don't know his plan, but we see enough to get the gist that he's terrorizing New York. We have an idea of plot structure and pacing right up until Harry takes Peter's mask off and we cut to the title. Gives us a good idea of the premise and excitement for what surprises could be in store. It's a great trailer. One of the best for Spider-Man, that's for sure (and fitting as it's one of the best movies).
Then with Spider-Man 3, you can see that he gets the black suit, in one of the trailers you get Sandman's deal, but the key thing is that you have no idea what's actually going on in the plot. It feels like a lot of different plots that will be turned on and off when necessary...and that's exactly what the film is. In retrospect, you can tell that they weren't confident enough in the screenplay to push that to the forefront of the film's marketing. The only big spoiler is Venom because they were banking on that putting butts in seats. I guess it worked because it's the second highest grossing Spider-Man movie behind Far From Home, but I digress.
Now I don't want to give anyone the wrong idea; I don't think you have to reveal the whole plot in a trailer. I just think it's interesting that often what happens is that a movie with more problems in the writing department tend to sell the film on visuals more than the premise. I also don't think all movies with mysterious trailers are bad; but I think that most bad movies have mysterious trailers, or rather they set insane expectations by being intentionally vague. That tends to lead to dispapointment more often than not, at least in my experience.
For the most part, we have a pretty clear idea of No Way Home's basic premise: Spider-Man's identity has been revealed, it causes problems for Peter and his loved ones. He asks Doctor Strange to cast a spell that will erase his identity from the public consciousness. It doesn't work and causes a crack in reality that brings in villains from other universes who all die fighting Spider-Man. Conflict ensues between Peter and Strange over the moral quandry of dooming them to their fate. This all culminates in a big action setpiece on the Statue of Liberty. There's still plenty of room for big surprises and twists, etc, but we at least have a clear idea of structure and can set our expectations pretty reasonably around what we know.
