Why They're Called Trailers When They Come First

Here’s a small thing that, once you notice it, you can’t stop noticing: a trailer plays before the film. So why is it called a trailer — a word that means the thing that comes behind, that trails along after?

Because it used to. The name is a fossil, and it records a way of going to the cinema that has completely vanished.

You didn’t buy a ticket for one film

In the early 1900s, a cinema ticket didn’t buy you a film. It bought you a seat, for as long as you wanted it. Inside ran a continuous loop — feature films, newsreels, cartoons, short comedies — and people drifted in and out at any point in the day, catching whatever was on and leaving when they’d had enough.

In that world, where did you put an advert for next week’s attraction? At the end of the reel. After the feature. So it would catch people as the film wound down, before they wandered off. It trailed the movie. It was, literally, a trailer.

The first one wasn’t even a film

The first trailer on record, in 1913, wasn’t advertising a movie at all. It was for a Broadway show — The Pleasure Seekers — promoted with cut-up footage from the production’s rehearsals.

The man behind it was Nils Granlund, an advertising manager for the Marcus Loew cinema chain (Loew would go on to found MGM). Granlund spliced the rehearsal clips into a short promotional reel and ran it after the feature in Loew’s theatres. A stage producer, advertising a play, accidentally inventing the form that would sell every film for the next century.

The most important format in movie marketing started as an advert for a play, shown after the movie, by a man who worked in theatre.

The monopoly nobody remembers

The form caught on fast, and by 1919 an entire company existed to make nothing else: the National Screen Service. For roughly forty years it held a near-total grip on American trailers, churning them out to a rigid, cookie-cutter formula — the same screen-swipes, the same fly-in titles, the same breathless hype. If you saw a trailer in America between the wars, the NSS almost certainly made it.

That stranglehold is why early trailers all feel so similar: they came from one factory.

The name outlived the reason

So what flipped them to the front? Money, and human nature. By the late 1930s, theatres noticed a problem with running previews after the feature: audiences left. The film ended, the lights came up, people stood and walked out — straight past the adverts for next week. So theatres moved the previews to before the film, where you were trapped in your seat and paying attention.

The placement changed. The name never did. We kept calling them trailers out of pure linguistic inertia, long after they stopped trailing anything.

It’s a tiny fossil of a word, carrying the shape of a cinema none of us will ever sit in. The same era gave us the booming narrator — the voice that ruled trailers for decades, and the strange reason it went silent.

This is Trailer Trash. We make trailers for films that don’t exist — and write about the ones that do. Follow along on [YouTube], [TikTok], [Instagram], and [X].