The 16 Best Movie Trailers of 2016

Like last year’s movie trailers countdown, the list below tries to find something creative and unique within a medium that’s really only supposed to do one thing: sell you tickets. But perhaps more than many years before, the trailers of 2016 seemed to capture everything beautifully right and everything horribly wrong about the film industry. It was, after all, the year in which the trailer for Suicide Squad was so successful the studio had the people who cut the trailer re-cut the film. As you can remember, that went well.
Still: One of these trailers made me nauseous; more than one made me cry. One trailer could prove, like Amy Adams discovered in Arrival, that we can manipulate reality, and not the other way around. One is the anecdote to that simmering, subcutaneous misery you’ve been feeling all year.
Still: Shout out to the Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 trailer; shout out to The Mummy; shout out to the Spiderman: Homecoming trailer, which I just saw like an hour ago. Shout out to the full trailer for War for the Planet of the Apes that came out today, which still looks phenomenal even if Woody Harrelson’s line-readings are weirdly sedate. (“And in the end, we learned that the Planet of the Apes was inside of us all along.”) Shout out to next year’s Star Wars: Episode VIII trailer, I’m sure you’ll do well.
2016 movie trailers have shown us what’s to come—may we march into the next year expecting more out of 2017.
16. The Boss Baby
The Boss Baby is an actual full-length feature film directed by the man who has stayed gainfully employed by churning out Madagascar flicks as fast as children can inhale them. The Boss Baby is not a well-tuned SNL Digital short or similar sketch-show parody of a trailer for a film that doesn’t exist. The Boss Baby does exist, and its plot is fully available within the tidy two minutes of its trailer, which efficiently sets up the movie’s conflict and lays out its protagonist’s stakes and ensures that babies will do real people things and also baby things and it will be hilarious when the two things are conflated because: Imagine a baby having cream applied to its butthole while wearing a three-piece suit! Priceless family entertainment.
The special-ness of the trailer for The Boss Baby is that it removes all necessity for The Boss Baby to even exist. A sneak peek so by-the-numbers, so marketably unaware of its raison d’être as movie trailer, so completely uninterested in being anything but something a Millennial could shit out in an hour using the first 20 minutes of the film, some outdated version of iMovie and a funk/soul song that might as well be a part of the public domain (in this case, it’s the Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing”—because business is this baby’s thing I guess?), the trailer for The Boss Baby rests comfortably in that liminal chasm between willing the full film into and wiping the full film from existence. There is still time: 20 million people have seen this trailer. What if we all just agree that we’ve already seen the whole movie? One-point-five out of four stars.
15. War for the Planet of the Apes
Whether it’s a metaphor for the civilization the talking war criminal apes will build from the ashes of our incinerated humanity, or a literal demonstration of how mo-cap works now, in this, the Worst Timeline, the face of Caesar (Andy Serkis) and an ominous threat of violence are enough to mean-mug us into submission. We get it: “War has begun.” And we know there’s nothing we can do about it.
14. Cars 3
Cars 3—at least, that’s what I guess it’s called. Whatever; it doesn’t matter. None of this matters.
Count the Cars “franchise” amongst my least favorite pile of pixels to ever exist abreast the now iconic Pixar logo, but I have to give it to the studio for replacing John Lasseter with storyboard artist Brian Fee and setting up the Cars universe for a grim paradigm shift. We can only hope: “From This Moment, Everything Will Change.” Yup: If there’s anything the past couple years of supposedly family friendly fare has shown us, it’s that we’re scraping the bottom of the Uncanny Valley at this point, and our animated films better be representing the same failure and amorality of the world surrounding us lest our kids fail to learn at any early age that the world is pain and death awaits us all.
13. The LEGO Batman Movie
Every new trailer loaded with franchise baggage has the heavy weight of cynicism to shoulder, especially when it comes to Batman and the Affleck’d damage Zack Snyder and David Ayer hath wrought (cue “Sounds of Silence”). Which is probably why The Lego Batman Movie has pushed a small armory of previews into the gaping maws of anyone willing to open their face to declare that 2016 crushed the Batman brand beyond repair. All it takes to shut up the critics, apparently, is a healthy pile of self-awareness. When Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) lists the many times we’ve been suckered into re-watching Bruce Wayne’s origin story over and over, we commiserate with his exhaustion, and we feel hope again: This may not be the Batman story we want, but it will be the Batman story we need—and also maybe the Batman story we want too.
12. Logan
The beauty of the Logan trailer is that it revels in a world without beauty—and what better song to serenade that “Empire of Dirt” than Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” cover, humanity’s favorite bummer hymn. Reexamining the ubiquity of the song, the trailer simultaneously redeploys it to suck all the tears from your face, and edits it so that we wonder if the song was ever actually all that good in the first place. The Logan trailer does not realize it is doing this—it wields “Hurt” in the same way Cash did, wringing all melodrama from the saddest, most xenophobic of the X-Men timelines—but by abridging the song to its empirical bits, segmenting it perfectly for maximum emotional impact, the ponderous melody which you feel like you’ve felt every inch of by now becomes yet another tool in an overused arsenal, as obvious as Logan’s desaturated color palette and as super-serious as the Wolverine’s drinking problem. Yet, despite all contrivance and however many shots there are of Jackman sucking his way to the bottom of a bottle, the song choice works. And so does the trailer. Which either means that the tone of our comic book movies are now expected to be set in brimstone if they ever hope to be taken seriously, or that we are an officially broken society of consumers, and the onslaught of over-budgeted, overhyped, overdone superhero flicks has worn our poor nerves down to their nubs.
11. The Handmaiden
A face-melting orgasm in slow motion, the trailer for The Handmaiden is so good I want to buy it a nice dinner and sit in silence and just watch it chew.
10. Voyage of Time
Like the two different versions of the film itself, the better of the available trailers for Terence Malick’s incomprehensibly immense opus is the second, narrated by Cate Blanchette. The first, starring Brad Pitt’s “reading a text book” voice, can barely hold a cosmic candle to Cate Blanchette’s few words, limned in portent and spoken with the intensity due a visual story about, literally, the Universe. Rather than simply give some context to the insane images Malick, without one hint of humility, has unleashed—really: Where do you have to go as a filmmaker when you’ve already made a movie about Everything?—Blanchette makes myth out of nothing; hers is the Word made interstellar flesh. This trailer readies viewers for something closer to a transformative experience, an emotional journey, rather than the big-budget National Geographic special Pitt’s voice sets Voyage of Time up as. I mean, it technically is a big-budget National Geographic special, but Malick’s ambitions greatly outstrip those origins, and Blanchette, first heard here, allows the filmmaker the right tone to make his vision a reality.