Best Movie Trailer of All Time

A trailer has roughly two minutes to make a stranger book a ticket, and it has to manage that without giving away the thing it is selling.

The craft is more specific than it looks from outside. The Dark Knight sold an entire performance with a voice laid over a burning building. Inception introduced a brass note so effective that the next decade of trailers copied it into complete meaninglessness. The Fellowship of the Ring had to explain an invented world to people who had never heard of it, and turned that into the appeal rather than the obstacle. The trailers that fail are almost always the ones that show you the plot instead of the feeling, and there are more of those every year.

The bracket runs to forty-six trailers, and the rule is narrow: judge the trailer, not the film it was selling. That rule cuts both ways, and the bracket is considerably more interesting for it. A few genuinely bad films were given extraordinary trailers, and several great films were sold with two dull minutes of footage that nobody remembers at all.