A closer look
Promotional movie trailers were originally shown at the very end of a feature film rather than at the beginning, which is exactly why the industry coined the term "trailer" in the first place; cinema owners quickly realized that audiences would just immediately leave the theater once the main picture concluded, meaning absolutely nobody was sticking around to watch the advertisements for upcoming releases, so they cleverly moved the previews to the front of the screening but were apparently too lazy to come up with a new word for them, making it a classic case of corporate logic that makes absolutely no sense out of context but has become so ingrained in our culture that nobody even questions it, and now we pay twenty dollars for a ticket just to sit through thirty-five solid minutes of trailers before the actual movie starts, effectively holding us hostage in a dark room with overpriced popcorn while studios aggressively scream their upcoming release slates directly into our faces
