Devil May Care About Spoilers, Jeez
It’s a good week to be a trailer editor who is bad at their job because it seems like destroying any element of surprise a piece of media may have is in fashion now, as displayed by the new Detective Pikachu trailer, and now, the launch trailer for Devil May Cry V.
This trailer, this one right here – don’t watch it.
Stuff like this reminds me of an interview that Matthew Vaughn, the director of Kingsman: The Golden Circle, did with IGN back in 2017 after a trailer included an enormous spoiler for the film’s first act.
“Well, I’m not in charge of marketing. The thinking about that was stupidity, to be blunt,” Vaughn said of the then-new Kingsman 2 trailer. “I begged the studio not to reveal it. Because it’s the whole driving force of the first act and if you didn’t know that scene it would’ve made the whole audience gasp. So you have to ask the lovely marketing guys because I think their job is to open the movie and don’t really care about the experience of the movie…There’s a great expression someone said to me: ‘the storyteller should be the story seller’, and I’m going to try and do that next time.”
It’s hard not to share his frustration this week – it’s super lame when companies put marketing ahead of creating a genuine experience, especially when the old “not showing major plot twists in advertising materials” has been working well otherwise for the past forever.
Devil May Cry 5 drops for PC, PS4 and Xbox One this coming Friday, March 8th. I’m sure if you play the demo available right now and watch this trailer, you’ll get the gist of it and can move on to the next hype train.