Spider-Man: Homecoming Tops Unruly’s Movie Trailer Effectiveness Chart
Creating a movie trailer that will drive box office ticket sales is far from easy.
After all, you want to whet the appetite of viewers enough to get them ready to part with their hard-earned cash. But you don’t want to give too much away. How many times do you watch a trailer in the cinema and feel like you have already watched the whole film? It’s a difficult balancing act.
As we know, creating buzz ahead of the movie’s opening weekend can make or break a film.
So why leave it to chance? Well, to help movie studios understand the emotional, social and business impact of their movie trailers we have created an awesome new add-on to our content testing tool Unruly EQ. Basically, we tweaked our EQ algorithm specifically for movie trailers.
It’s called Unruly EQ for Trailers™, and can predict the effectiveness of a movie trailer before it’s launched.
It can help marketers understand how well a trailer emotionally connects with moviegoers, but also their theatre-going preferences (how quickly and with whom they plan to see a film) and how best to optimise trailers for increased engagement.
Videos tested are also given an overall EQ score – a combined metric out of 10 which incorporates the intensity of emotions viewers felt while watching, movie favorability and ticket purchase intent.
So to help launch EQ for Trailers, we thought we would have a bit of fun by looking closer at some of the trailers of the most highly-anticipated movies of the year – indies like The Big Sick as well as big budget blockbusters like Wonder Woman and Star Wars – and ranking them by their overall effectiveness.
We call it Unruly’s Movie Effectiveness Chart – and as I am sure you have already guessed from looking at the headline – the first official trailer for Spider-Man: Homecoming is top of the list.
The first look at the latest reboot of the Spider-Man franchise, starring Tom Holland as the popular web-slinging superhero, took the number one spot with a score of 6.3, beating out trailers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Wonder Woman, which landed in joint-second place with EQ scores of 6.1.
Spider-Man: Homecoming scored 50% for movie favorability, 49% for ticket purchase intent and 48% of viewers wanted to find out more.
A trailer for Cars 3 was fourth, while the first trailer for the third in the Planet of the Apes trilogy, War for the Planet of The Apes, was seventh. The Movie Effectiveness Chart also tested a number of indie films as well as big-budget films to analyse the differences between the two groups.
Here’s a quick rundown of the chart – To see the full thing, click here.
Unruly’s Movie Effectiveness Chart
1. Spider-Man Homecoming – 6.3
2/3. Wonder Woman – 6.1 (tie)
2/3. Star Wars Last Jedi – 6.1 (tie)
4. Cars 3 – 5.7
5/6. The Big Sick – 5.6 (tie)
5/6. The Dark Tower – 5.6 (tie)
7. War for the Planet of the Apes – 5.3
8. Baby Driver – 4.9
9. A Ghost’s Story – 4.1
10. Band Aid – 4.0
One of the metrics also analysed is Movie Converters, which measures the percentage of people who increase their intent to see the movie on the opening weekend after watching the trailer – despite previously stating they did not want to see the film. While some of the trailers for the indie movies fell behind most in the chart compared to some of the blockbuster trailers, the films which converted the most people of any trailer studied were indies: The Big Sick (37%) and Baby Driver (34%).
This analysis originally appeared on Adweek.
Want to know more about the chart methodology?
Unruly tested 10 official trailers for some of the most highly-anticipated indie and blockbuster movies of the year using contest testing tool, EQ for Trailers. Each EQ score is out of 10, with 5 the average EQ score for the entertainment industry. The score is based on a number of key metrics, including the intensity of emotions viewers felt while watching, increased movie favorability and ticket purchase intent.
