Trailer Week, Day Four - The Terminator, 1984
By Burbanked on Aug 24, 2006 in Movie Marketing 101, Movies, Trailers, Views and Reviews | 1,620 views |
I recently read that Jim Cameron’s Aliens had a budget of under $20 million. Hey, that’s amazing because we’re living in a post-Superman Returns, $250+++ million world, right? But Cameron’s original Terminator cost about $6.4 million to make. That’s roughly the pricetag on Bryan Singer’s porta-potty this last time out.
So I would imagine that when audiences first saw the Terminator trailer, they weren’t sure what to make of it. Arnold wasn’t a star just yet, nobody else in the movie looked familiar, and although the guns and explosions are impressive and enticing, this sure didn’t look like Ghostbusters or Beverly Hills Cop - the two box office champions of that year.
And ultimately, Terminator miserably underperformed compared to its flashier, snappier competition - but in retrospect, who the heck cares? Terminator has stood the test of time much better than other movies of that era, and this trailer is as tight and exciting as they come. The clip even goes so far as to hijack Reese’s best line - about how the Terminator can’t be bargained or reasoned with; that it doesn’t feel pity, remorse or fear, etc. - and lets Mr. Movie Voice 1984 say it! Would Tom Cruise give up his best dialogue to a nameless trailer announcer these days? I think not.
It’s a terrific trailer, packed with action; we hear Sarah Connor asking “What does he want with me” but we don’t get an answer!; and Arnold doesn’t speak a word, probably owing as much to a sense of menace that the filmmakers wanted to create for him as to the fact that his accent was so thick they kept him from talking much.
Remember, The Movie List has a dandy page with a big list of great trailers, old and new. I’m getting this week’s picks from that list, but there’s a whole lot more there to see. Take the afternoon off work and go take a look.
Coming up tomorrow in Trailer Week: the greatest, shortest-lived trailer. Ever.
My blog-love affair with cartoonist Doug Savage’s terrific daily Savage Chickens (
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because clearly Cage has decided to become action/thriller cinema’s first Polish great-grandma. (
Well, that’s too bad. Back a year or so ago when I heard that they’d be making a movie out of Judi and Ron Barrett’s terrific kids’ book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I hoped maybe it’d be made live-action. Handled well, the idea of seeing an actual town where it rained hotdogs and baked beans in an open-roof restaurant, as well as the bit where sanitation trucks clean up all the leftover rain/snow/food and feed it to the pets would be, I thought, a bundle of CG-imbued cinema fun. 
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