This week, we’re looking at probably the strongest contender for the theatrical holiday season, as James Cameron prepares us for the next film in the Avatar series—with a third film taking a fairly reasonable three years from the last, in stark contrast to the thirteen-year wait between the first and second movies.

Topping off a summer that has seen and heard K-pop ascending new global heights thanks to the runaway hit film KPop Demon Hunters (whose soundtrack as of this writing has seven songs in the top 30 on Billboard”s Hot 100!), Apple TV is about to launch a K-pop song battle tv series titled KPOPPED.

The first few seconds of the trailer set up Keanu Reeves as an amiable would-be angel, with epic choir and strings serving as a foil to his clearly fake wings; the music drops out as a by stander expresses incredulity. But Reeves’ character persists, stating “I’m an angel” as the iconic piano riff from Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” ring out.

Zach Cregger’s new film Weapons comes out this Friday. Over an ominous synthesizer drone, the film’s second trailer opens with elementary school teacher Justine (Julia Garner) facing a gym full of angry and worried parents. At 0:09 we catch a glimpse of one of the mysterious runaway kids running, arms spread wide, on black and white CCTV footage - and a growling synthesizer adds menace.

Based on a bestselling novel by Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary follows Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher tasked with saving Earth from a mysterious organism that is dimming the sun. Compounding the challenge is the fact that he awakes from a coma having no idea how he got there in the first place.

The official teaser for the fifth and final season of Netflix’s hit sci-fi tv series Stranger Things came out last week. Using a classic Deep Purple song, it delivers adrenaline and goosebumps.

Starring Jennifer Lopez, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a screen adaptation of a musical under the same name, originally run in Toronto in 1992, and later the West End and Broadway in 1993.

The Naked Gun is being rebooted with Liam Neeson playing the lead. A film franchise known for comedy that is at once raunchy, slapstick, and tongue-in-cheek, this trailer cleverly flips trailer music conventions on their head for a laugh. Its microteaser features the sound of a siren, as Frank Drebin Jr (Neeson, as the son of the cop played by Leslie Nielsen in the original films) gets passed a cup of coffee as if through a drive-through window. At 0:05, we see the skyline of Los Angeles at night and hear a single high register piano note, a familiar action thriller trailer trope. Martial drum rhythms come in at 0:10, as we see a motorcycle chase accompanied by Neeson’s seemingly serious voice-over. But the music cuts out at 0:14 to make space for the squelch of the Monty Python-esque adversary’s arms being ripped off mid-fight.

Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, The Roses is a reboot of the 1989 black comedy The War of the Roses; its ensemble cast include comedy luminaries such as Andy Samberg, Kate McKinnon, and Zoë Chao.

Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film in the franchise, hits theatres July 2nd, and today’s blog explores this film’s Official Trailer 2. Off the start we see a sterile white lab, with space age doors and technicians in full hazmat suits. Music is understated: high sustained violins and a low-pitched rumbling. A drum flourish segues into a cut at 0:05, and now technicians are fleeing a lab room that’s bathed in ominous red light. We hear screams.

Starring Brad Pitt and directed by Joseph Kosinski, F1 is a redemption story following Sonny Hayes (Pitt) as a promising Formula One driver. However, he suffered a career-halting accident in the 90s, only to be recruited by a struggling team some thirty years later with the promise of potential return to racing glory.

Jon M. Chu’s critically acclaimed adaptation of the broadway musical Wicked rewrote the playbook for film musicals in 2024, and that was just Act 1. Today let’s check out the music and sound in last week’s Wicked: For Good official trailer.

Back this summer with a new Marvel television series is Riri Williams, aka Ironheart (Dominique Thorne), whom we met in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. She’s the teen genius who built an Iron Man suit in her MIT dorm room. The trailer’s soundtrack sports high energy grooves from pop star Doechii.

This week we’re listening to the official trailer for the 2024 TIFF People’s Choice Award-winning film The Life of Chuck, directed by Mike Flanagan, based on a 2020 Stephen King novella. The trailer opens with a 5-second micro-teaser which shows the author of this story is Stephen King, but it's not horror. The micro-teaser is accompanied by a triumphant orchestral chord and percussion flourishes on the beat which align with the visual cuts, while we get glimpses of main characters including adult Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) dancing joyfully, and Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) laughing.

Him is a sports horror film produced by Jordan Peele, and its recent teaser trailer uses a blend of classical and electronic music which pivots from catchy to terrifying. After opening with the sound of a bank of stadium lights turning on, orchestral strings begin playing a single note, in octaves. The music gets louder as we see a claustrophobically close shot of a man’s face, eyes shut. Music cuts at 0:07 when the man opens his eyes. As fighter jets fly in formation high above a football stadium at 0:10, we hear a version of Bach’s “Badinerie” from the Orchestral Suite No. 2 enter with a pulsing rhythm and melody in B Minor.

Rockstar Games released a new trailer last week for Grand Theft Auto VI, which comes out in May 2026. The viral trailer (over 100 million views in its first week) features six songs, mostly used as diegetic or source music, edited to feel as though they could be coming from a car stereo and heard by the characters in the game. Still, the trailer narrates rather than demonstrates, so the immersivity of simulated gameplay has given way to storytelling, albeit winning players through nostalgia for earlier versions of GTA and the trailers’s impressive CGI and soundtrack.

Never count a karate kid out—forty-one years in, the Karate Kid franchise is making another comeback, some fifteen years after the reboot of the original 80s/90s tetralogy. This time, Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio reprise their roles from the original series, taking on more of an emeritus role as a new generation takes the lead, starring Ben Wang as martial arts student Li Fong.

In film trailers where the visuals are mesmerizing, a less-is-more approach to the soundtrack can be very effective. The recent trailer for Tron: Ares has only 5 lines of dialogue and the music is made up mostly of droning sustained notes, with brief snatches of pulsing electronic music. To be sure, for a Tron film, the music needs to be electronic - the whole premise of the film franchise is the interconnections between the real world and the digital world. And Tron: Legacy (2010) featured a soundtrack by EDM icons Daft Punk, while the original Tron (1982) had an electronic score by synthesizer pioneer Wendy Carlos.

While we’re still about a year out from the next Avengers instalment, Marvel has a couple of big summer releases this year, beginning with the comedy-infused Thunderbolts. Best thought of as Marvel’s answer to DC’s Suicide Squad, here we see a gang of unlikely antiheroes rounded up to face a new threat in the absences of the Avengers (hence the asterisk in the title—“the Avengers are not available”).

Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon film franchise is about to join the recent trend of live action / computer graphic remakes of hit animated films (i.e. Snow White). Its official trailer, released in February, uses nearly every sound we’d expect from the trailer music repertoire, including massive drum accents, industrial droning synths, pulsing orchestral strings, sombre high register piano, and wordless choir - it’s all here (as well as the full plotline).