At the opening of the trailer for 1930s thriller The Weight, we see the beginnings of a backroom deal between Murphy (Ethan Hawke), a prisoner trying to get back to his daughter, and Clancy (Russell Crowe), a prison warden looking to recruit gold smugglers.

From the mind of Robert Eggers (2024’s Nosferatu, anyone?) comes Werwulf; starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, and Willem Dafoe, it’s set in 13th century England, continuing Eggers’ penchant for plumbing the depths of horror and the unknown.

The new trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day features music that fittingly blends the martial type of orchestral scoring blueprinted by Alan Silvestri for the Avengers film franchise, with a taste of the fluid synthesizer aesthetic of Metro Boomin’s music production in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. 

Disney’s 3D animation division is back with another modern fantasy, this time focusing on the coming of age for Billie, a teen who feels miscast and out of place in her suburban life and discovers the magical realm of Hexe.

A remake of Spanish film The People Upstairs (2020), The Invite has a new trailer that sports a modern remix of the famous opera aria “Habanera” from Georges Bizet’s Carmen. It’s a Spanish-inspired American film using music from a Spanish-inspired French opera. The trailer opens with some verbal sparring between Angela (played by Olivia Wilde, who directs and co-stars) and Joe (Seth Rogen) while a persistent note on the double bass and pulsing shakers establish a groove. The editing here helps many of the words in this dialogue land on beat with the music.

Directed by David Robert Mitchell (best known for the critical acclaimed It Follows), The End of Oak Street adds to a recent crop of more original ideas coming out of Hollywood—we’re thinking, of course, of the runaway success to Backrooms. 

The final trailer for Steven Spielberg’s latest film Disclosure Day opens by setting up a sci-fi story. We see close-ups of characters' faces as they look to the sky, and we hear sound design evoking the distant explosions and crackling fire lighting the sky, while synthesizers pulse away.

But then the trailer does something I have hardly ever known a cinematic trailer to do.

Directed by Zachary Wigon and distributed by Bleecker Street, Victorian Psycho originally had some different talent and distribution attachments, intended to be a film starring Margaret Qualley and distributed by A24. Instead, Maika Monroe stars—known as a “scream queen” (a woman prominently featured in horror films), in the vein of Jamie Lee Curtis or Jenna Ortega.

The first trailer or teaser for Christopher Nolans upcoming epic The Odyssey showcased the film’s grand Mediterranean vistas through IMAX cinematography, with a scant three lines of dialogue sprinkled in. This week, we’ll unpack the music and sound in the second trailer for The Odyssey, released May 5th. While there is a lot more story unveiled in this new trailer, the music stays pretty faithful to the tone of the first trailer.

A24’s Anthony Bourdain biopic dropped its first trailer last week, and we at Trailaurality are absolutely seated. Dominic Sessa stars as a young Bourdain in 1976 Provincetown—years before culinary school, and decades before Kitchen Confidential.

The trailer for Ridley Scott’s upcoming post-apocalyptic thriller film The Dog Stars makes great use of Van Morrison’s 1970 classic song “Into the Mystic.” The song is in, right from the opening shot, with acoustic guitar creating a tender backdrop as we see Hig (Jacob Elordi) and his wife playing with their dog. The moment ends abruptly at 0:11 with a jump cut to Hig alone in the same room, now with the lights out. The lighthearted guitar is replaced with the echoing sound of distant wind.

After being nearly permanently shelved years ago for the tax write-off, Wile E. Coyote has seen the light of day this past week with the first official trailer for the live action-animated Coyote vs Acme.

This week’s Trailaurality blog explores the official teaser trailer for Dune: Part Three. Hans Zimmer’s scores for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films have made exciting and creative uses of layered vocals (check out his theme for the Bene Gesserit), so it rings true that the music in this trailer features humming, chanting, and shouting. The trailer’s cut in three parts, each part more intense than the previous. 

The official trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping dropped on April 13th, and it’s a clear shift. The franchise that blended James Newton Howard’s careful orchestration with curated alt and folk soundtracks has just released a remixed The Who track from 1973 over its first full-length trailer, announcing this isn’t your parents’ Hunger Games. Or, maybe rather it’s your grandparents’ Hunger Games—being as it is a prequel set twenty four years before the original, and the aesthetic definitely leans 70s here.

Aleasha Harris has adapted her award-winning 2018 play Is God Is into a thriller film and it looks and sounds intense. Gritty, distorted bass guitar comes in with a low register riff at 0:03 and even though we see on screen a black and white shot of two young girls (Racine and Anaia) hugging on a park bench, the music foreshadows conflict.

Following its 2021 reboot (and before that, the 1995 and 1997 originals), one of the most enduring video game movie franchises returns for round two courtesy of Warner Bros.

Mandatory military service now complete, BTS are back. Their new album Arirang was released on March 20th, their first album since 2022. Netflix, longtime proponents of the Korean Wave (Squid Game, K-Pop Demon Hunters, etc.), are releasing a documentary about this historic comeback.

First announced in 2023, Guy Ritchie’s latest has finally found its way to a release window, with a trailer leaning hard into his signatures: silence with style, dialogue with panache, and a hard-hitting music drop.

This week we’ll listen to the trailer for The Testaments, a new Hulu tv series based on a dystopian Margaret Atwood novel set years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. For the opening 19 seconds of the trailer we have voiceover from Agnes (played by rising star Chase Infiniti, who co-starred in One Battle After Another), as we see her present her dollhouse, with scene inserts of real people acting out the roles of the dolls she is describing. Meanwhile, the music sticks to gentle cinematic minimalism, slowly pivoting between two neighbouring notes using a voice-like synthesizer. It feels vaguely creepy, but we’re nowhere near horror film scoring. Yet.

Pixar's longest-running franchise is back for round five. The official trailer for Toy Story 5 dropped on February 19th, and while the teaser back in November leaned into INXS' "Never Tear Us Apart" as a statement of loyalty between toys and their kids, this full trailer takes a decidedly different tonal approach, trading a trailer deep in its feels for one that pivots towards a near-manic declaration of war against screens.